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The Context of Search

May 16th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.

I was at FAST‘s Future of Media meeting in NYC today.  It was a very interesting panel discussion and un-conference which included the following speakers:

Perry Solomon, VP within FAST’s Media practice (and fellow Sloanie)
Tom Smith, Director of Applications Development at Hearst (and fellow Primedia colleague)
Benjamin Rudolph who manages search for Comcast
Benjamin Ropke, enterprise architect for digital asset management at NBC Universal

All of the discussions that took place were interesting including but certainly not limited to meta data, user generated content, search-based product development and multimedia search.  Each of the topics may make for interesting future posts but the one topic that jumped out as a great post topic was something Benjamin Rudolph brought to the fore called “the context of search”.

The basic premise is that search is not just the technology that finds the correct result set based on what the user types in.  There is an “art” to search and that “art” of search is bringing to the user’s attention the results that are most contextual to the site itself.  This means the result sets should have context to the type of information you would think the user is coming to your particular site for.  Yes, a fairly obvious point but one that is lost in the noise often.  And it sounds quite inline with what was discussed in a prior post regarding role-based search applications.

To bring the point home, let’s use an an example or two that were discussed at the event this afternoon:

A user searches for “Tiger”.  Are they looking for Tiger Woods, Tiger (the version of OS X) or Tiger, the animal.  Well, with a large enough archive, all types of results from the same search index would be correct.  When you search for the term “Tiger” at Google, it provides you with results that match each of these.  In fact, all three types of “tiger” comes to you in the first eight links. But the art of the context of search is to align it with the context of the site.  If you are at a sports site, then Tiger Woods is probably the most appropriate.  And if you are at the National Geographic site, the user is probably looking for the big cat.

Another example that was closer to the Comcast business was searching for “24″.  Here context becomes even more interesting.  If you are a user that searches for “24″ at Amazon, the context governs that the user is probably looking for the season-by-season DVD box set.  At Comcast, however, the user is probably looking for the on-air schedule and even the online video collection for the show.  All related to the show “24″ but each site provides information to the user with a lot more contextual sensitivity.

Again, seems fairly obvious but I found it made an interesting enough point to bring it up here for discussion.

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  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    I have to admit that the most interesting thing about this post was the revelation that Comcast has someone who “manages search.” If <a href=”http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/05/finding-visible-clothes-for-emperor.html” rel=”nofollow”>
    Jakob Nielsen</a> is upset by the “glossy but useless” Web sites coming out of Web 2.0, I suspect that just about any set-top box would drive him apoplectic! I have now tried to “search” with my own Comcast box and with a friend’s TiVo/DirectTV hookup. On the scale of my life experiences, this one ranked far below debugging assembly code on a PDP-8! My guess is that most Comcast customers do not even know that search is an option. (I do not think my friend knew she had it with her TiVo/DirectTV.)
    None of this is meant to discredit Rudolph’s recognition of the value of context, which is likely to be the biggest challenge for the future of the living room, so to speak. Several years ago I was told that Amazon’s biggest search problem was in their Music “store,” because too many search requests would yield either way too much (mostly of the wrong thing) or nothing at all. This is sort of the “24″ problem blown up to an even larger scale.
    Context is as much social as it is “semantic,” however. Graham Button talks about the problems of introducing a new technology in a workplace; and the problem that most concerns him is that any work setting has its own “immutable work practices” (his words) before the new technology is introduced. If the learning curve for the new technology does not take those immutable practices into account, the new technology many lower productivity rather than raise it.
    So it is with home entertainment. However poorly it may have been designed, the Comcast box has now been around so long that a whole barrage of immutable practices have formed around it. Those practices would drive Nielsen (and probably most of your readers) crazy; but, like it or not, they are now part of the context of the consumer market. The path to the “Future of Media” will have to take them into account, which means that it will probably have any number of twists and turns that those of us with “technological common sense” cannot possibly anticipate!

  • http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/ Stephen Smoliar

    I have to admit that the most interesting thing about this post was the revelation that Comcast has someone who “manages search.” If <a href=”http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/05/finding-visible-clothes-for-emperor.html” rel=”nofollow”>
    Jakob Nielsen</a> is upset by the “glossy but useless” Web sites coming out of Web 2.0, I suspect that just about any set-top box would drive him apoplectic! I have now tried to “search” with my own Comcast box and with a friend’s TiVo/DirectTV hookup. On the scale of my life experiences, this one ranked far below debugging assembly code on a PDP-8! My guess is that most Comcast customers do not even know that search is an option. (I do not think my friend knew she had it with her TiVo/DirectTV.)

    None of this is meant to discredit Rudolph’s recognition of the value of context, which is likely to be the biggest challenge for the future of the living room, so to speak. Several years ago I was told that Amazon’s biggest search problem was in their Music “store,” because too many search requests would yield either way too much (mostly of the wrong thing) or nothing at all. This is sort of the “24″ problem blown up to an even larger scale.

    Context is as much social as it is “semantic,” however. Graham Button talks about the problems of introducing a new technology in a workplace; and the problem that most concerns him is that any work setting has its own “immutable work practices” (his words) before the new technology is introduced. If the learning curve for the new technology does not take those immutable practices into account, the new technology many lower productivity rather than raise it.

    So it is with home entertainment. However poorly it may have been designed, the Comcast box has now been around so long that a whole barrage of immutable practices have formed around it. Those practices would drive Nielsen (and probably most of your readers) crazy; but, like it or not, they are now part of the context of the consumer market. The path to the “Future of Media” will have to take them into account, which means that it will probably have any number of twists and turns that those of us with “technological common sense” cannot possibly anticipate!

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