HCIR 2010

I attended the HCIR 2010 workshop last Sunday on “Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval”. Dan Russell from Google gave the keynote. This is a guy who is passionate about what he does, and it seems that his job is to study how people search, including how they think about searching, how they conduct searches, how they use search interfaces, etc. and to figure out how they could do it better.

One of the biggest problems that exists, he believes, is that there is no training or education for search. The overwhelming majority of people just do not know how to search well. For instance, he found that most people don't know that you can use control-F on almost every program in order to find a word or phrase. This is something that most techie people take for granted when they are looking for something. For certain searches, you look at the results in Google, you pop open one of the results that looks promising, and then you control-F to find your keyword on the page and see if it is what you're looking for. The step of using control-F obviously speeds things up greatly. According to Dan this is something that most people just don't know about. I was skeptical and so I mentioned it to someone I know who is a professional (college educated, works in an office, etc.) and he knew that you could do that in Excel but didn't realize that it worked in all programs. I was sort of astounded by this, which was something that Dan had mentioned happens to him all the time. So for search instead of making the results somehow better, there may be a lot more value in training the user and providing tips or heuristics to help the user while they are searching.