Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic

It’s been more than 10 years (actually, closer to 15 years now) since web search engines became mainstream. Anyone who’s been using google or similar engines is certainly becoming painfully aware of the woeful inadequacies that these engines posses. Surely the time has come to send those obsolete beasts to the elephant graveyard, and to tackle the problem with a fresh perspective.

Here, then, is a prioritized list of suggestions on how to improve the searching experience on the web:

Don’t tell me everything you know

If you meet a knowledgeable friend and ask him to help you with your next purchase of a digital camera, he’s not going to do it by blurting out absolutely everything he knows about digital cameras. That would be an overkill, and thus uncivilized.

Instead, he will most certainly engage you in a mini discovery session. Your opening question (’tell me how to buy the best digital camera?’) will be handled by gently asking several follow-up questions. Questions such as ‘what would be your budget for this purchase?’, ‘what do you intend to use this camera for?’, ‘how much previous experience with digital photography have you got?’, etc.

In a similar vein, a web search engine should engage us in refining our search. If I ask it to search the web for the “ball”, it should not simply go away and come back 0.19 seconds later with “about 346,000,000 results for ball”. 346 million results?!? Jesus, what kind of a result is that? Who on earth has the time to even entertain the idea that there could be hundreds of millions of results that are being offered?

As you can see, totally useless. Time for the google search engine to hit the old dusty trail… Same goes for all the other ‘me too’ search engines currently available on the web.

Ask me the next most reasonable question

If someone asks me “ball?”, without giving me any context for their question whatsoever, what should my most reasonable follow-up question be?

Most likely, I would ask the interrogator: “Is this question related to porn?” (most web searches tend to be pornography related, and not knowing anything about the context of the search, I’d prefer to rule out the most likely case).

If the answer is negative, I would further ask if the question is commercial in nature (i.e. is the user looking to purchase a ‘ball’ of some sorts). Being able to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial resources on the web will help us shave off many, many millions of potential ‘hits’.

Following that, I’d ask the user if the question was sports-related. If it is, then I’d ask whether the ‘ball’ the user is inquiring about is a tennis ball, or a football, a soccer ball, a volley ball, etc.

If not, is it related to dancing (as in ballroom dancing)?

And so on. We can see that a much more reasonable searching experience is inevitably associated with establishing the context by asking sensible questions based on common knowledge (as well as on a bit of statistically valid data).

Offer me to establish my search identity

Today’s search engines are dull and dumb. Even though I may be using google thousands of times each month, my each search on google is treated as if that’s the first time I’ve ever searched for anything. The results google gives back to me do not, by any stretch of imagination, reflect my personal preferences, tastes, and biases.

As such, google is not only useless, but also infuriating. Instead of being so haughty, google and other search engines should dismount their high horse and allow me to register with them as an active and avid searcher. Once I become known to these engines, I should be in the position to declare to them my preferences. Such as: “I’m not interested in any searches that are porn-related”, or “I’m not looking to spend any money on the web, so don’t bother offering me any links where someone may be selling something”. And so on, the moral is that I should be able to be in the driver’s seat and to consequently control, shape and refine the results of my searches.

Will google ever do it?

The answer is: of course not! Currently miserable and poor state of searching on the web is not there by accident. It fulfills certain agenda and certain business model. Google and other behemoths on the web obviously do not care about regular human users and their needs, they care only abut their bottom line. So, it’s all about making profit.

Because of that, I’m not holding any high hopes. The sad thing is that google does have all the means necessary to enable our searching on the web to transform from being painful and a huge waste of time, to being pleasurable and highly efficient. But, they won’t do anything to help us bridge that gap, and that’s why we must rely on our own devices, meaning, the community.

So this is a first call to the community to start uniting and working on ousting google from the search king throne. Hopefully, the open source community will once again manage to pull yet another stunt off, and to dethrone the dictators. I for one can’t wait to get a thousand-fold better search experience.