Search should work like magic

The points made by the article you found us are all valid and good. It reminds me of the article I commented on last week. In Blogs as Brains, you brought up the valid point of the web resembling our human brains. I mentioned that better search engine technology would help us all to better manage knowledge.

The items discussed in "Search Engines Should Work like Magic" are all very good and valid design issues. I am of the school of thought that the scarier aspect of the problem is our brains.

We can catalog every single item of knowledge and design the "perfect" search engine and put a pigeon at the keyboard. Your results will be a trip to the store to buy, at best, a new keyboard cover. The equally important issue is that we must educate people on "how" to use this technology or, as Mr. Robetson is discussing, design around it.

I read your blog and "Column Two" because you have taught me much. Your blog is where I first heard of blogbridge, evernote and other such valuable tools. Keeping with the theme of "Blogs as Brain", here are some of the human factors that should frighten us:

• The fact that the average user does not seem to even know what the word Boolean means and, if they do, they know little about how to apply the logic. A better interface will help with this but user knowledge is always the imperative first step.
• The misconception of what a good search actually is. I hope Scoble was being sarcastic when he mentioned that out of 713 results Google can only display 62. Who has time to check that many items? More frightening, look at how many individuals commented on that post. A good search is ten items all directly related to what you are looking for and is not ten pages of items which just so happen to contain one of your search words. Does the average user "get that"? Looking at co-workers, I am not sure that I agree with Mr. Robetson's statement regarding "first few results". I agree it is the right goal but am not certain it is currently what most users think is good.
• Making the relevant institutions understand the above point. How many universities and libraries simply get a Google search box and use it rather than an internal engine tailored to the organization's needs?

I agree that saving five minutes per person can add up to a mountain. The technology will always improve and help with that. My question is "how much time would we save per user if we taught each one of them to use Boolean logic for searches?" I suspect much, much more.