Yahoo Exec: 'People Don't Want to Search'
Search has become so pervasive on the Web as part of our regular activities that it's tempting to assume it will be central to any future Web advances.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo, didn't get the memo.
"It's very limiting to think of the Web as merely a mechanism for retrieving data," Raghavan said in a panel discussion here Tuesday wrapping up the two-day DEMO conference. "The next step is divining the intent of what people are doing and fulfilling their tasks. I've always believed people intrinsically don't want to search, they come to work to do what the boss wants.... We have to get further on achievement than the notion of the retrieval engine as the ultimate target."
One example Raghavan gave of where search is limited is trying to plan a vacation. "You spend hours or days from start to end with repeated search engine queries. At the end there's a glaring inequity, you the human being spent all that time, while the combined CPUs spent five seconds on your task."
Source:internetnews
Search has become so pervasive on the Web as part of our regular activities that it's tempting to assume it will be central to any future Web advances.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo, didn't get the memo.
"It's very limiting to think of the Web as merely a mechanism for retrieving data," Raghavan said in a panel discussion here Tuesday wrapping up the two-day DEMO conference. "The next step is divining the intent of what people are doing and fulfilling their tasks. I've always believed people intrinsically don't want to search, they come to work to do what the boss wants.... We have to get further on achievement than the notion of the retrieval engine as the ultimate target."
One example Raghavan gave of where search is limited is trying to plan a vacation. "You spend hours or days from start to end with repeated search engine queries. At the end there's a glaring inequity, you the human being spent all that time, while the combined CPUs spent five seconds on your task."
Source:internetnews