The human approach to finding information on the internet
1997-01-21
If hunting for information on search engines has left you a little frustrated
then perhaps you should make use of one of the newest search techniques on the
web - the human being.
Five undergraduate students from the University of Rhode Island have started a
project called HumanSearch which accepts, enquires and returns answers in
everyday English.
Unlike search engines that you may have become accustomed to, HumanSearch
doesn't ask you to enter queries using any syntax other than what you learnt
at school.
Questions such as "What is the population of Portugal?" or "When does it rain
in Brazil?" are answered by students who collect the answers on the internet
and in the school library and then provide an easily understandable response
by e-mail.
HumanSearch could be seen as a human interface to search engines. Let's face
it, search engines aren't always easy to use. Without going into any advanced
or customised searches, I tried the first question above on some of the more
popular search engines.
AltaVista returned 200 000 documents, HotBot didn't find anything, Lycos found
"Whatcom County Population" amongst 52566 other documents and Excite found 678
311 documents.
Both AltaVista and Excite returned a document containing the Portuguese
population in 1989 as their number one document. So as a first attempt, I
didn't get much gratification from the search engines.
If I were to dig a little deeper then I am confident that I could find the
answer. But why dig around if someone else will do it for you? And that is
exactly what HumanSearch will do for you at no cost to yourself.
The downside to HumanSearch is that they can take up to 48 hours to return an
answer. This requires you to think your questions ahead of time. It may not
satisfy the information junkies who require instant results but is likely to
become invaluable to people doing research projects.
HumanSearch was established when its founders experienced first hand the
problems associated with search engines. Information overload is one of the
most common challenges. If your search is not specific enough then it is
common to have hundreds of thousands of documents returned to you. To make
your search more specific requires learning syntax that is often based on
computer logic. This is acceptable to computer geeks but not to the man in the
street.
Another company offering a similar service is answers.com, who run their
search engine as a commercial venture. Users get charged depending on the
complexity of their questions. Prices range from US$1.79 for an easy question
to US$11.99 for a hard question. If your question falls out of the scope of
their categories then answers.com will provide a quote before starting the
search.
HumanSearch and answers.com add a new category to the existing two types of
search engines. AltaVista, Excite, HotBot and Yahoo make use of digital robots
that crawl around the world wide web collecting information about all of the
pages that they find.
Yahoo, on the other hand provides a structured directory of information
organised into categories and sub-categories. It is updated by humans but you
still need to use computer syntax to answer your queries.
Predictions are widespread that technology and more specifically the internet
will cause massive job losses as people are replaced with computers. Search
engines could be a good example of technology making a task more efficient but
requiring humans (performing a different, more advanced task) to make them
accurate.
Just as scribes were made redundant and new opportunities for authors opened
up in 1450 when Johann Guttenburg invented the printing press, so too might
search engines make librarians redundant but open up tremendous opportunities
for information specialists who are able to separate the knowledge from the
data.