Information Outlook, Vol. 6, No. 11, November 2002

Marketing Searchers in the Shifting Sands of Search

by Stephen Abram

Consider these three contradictions in the daily life of the professional searcher:

1. Many search pros find themselves teaching searching skills to end users, but the real gap in teaching is actually where to search.

2. Finding is what users want and what drives their search satisfaction; searching and rigorous, high-quality process is what librarians excel at. These are two very different value systems.

3. Effective searching (i.e., input) is only half the equation; search result display (i.e., output) is equally important. The search industry development action now is in understanding default displays and where the value lies, and manipulating display.

Ambiguity rules. How do we market professional searching skills if, by their very nature, there is an inherent contradiction between these skills and what the market needs and values? Selling ourselves as "search pros" when the buyers value "finding" is a disconnect. Selling input skills when buyers want the outputs is a disconnect. And marketing our narrow searching skills instead of our high-level search environment competencies is also a disconnect. The solution may be rather simple. We must doff our librarian prejudices and change our communications about what we offer by

1. Choosing searching tools that mitigate the mistakes of novice end users (Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.)

2. Never implying that our high-level searching skills are more than casually related to the armies of Googlers pounding their eager fingers on keyboards.

3. Developing a new language to discuss and market the key differences between free Web searches and finely tuned subscription search styles and skills. Advanced searching definitely doesn't just mean more search boxes in the search form or enabling a few plug-in search buddy applications!

It's the Context, Stupid

One challenge our end users face is seeing the breadth and depth of their searching "words" in the context of the big picture—the word stuff we eat and breathe (thesauri, dictionaries, authority files, dreaded 'nyms, etc.). There has been some real progress in this area. We know through search tracking that the average user almost always just types in a simple one- or two-word search—guilelessly unaware of the dangers of the unthinking pressing of the Enter button. Try the following two sites to see some pretty neat ways of providing context for simple word searches:

· Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com) is a multilingual (English, Portuguese, Italian, and French, so far) search engine that displays a simple search result as a solar system­style representation of the information domain you're seeking. For instance, searching "Ostrogoths" results in a detailed display of all related terms organized around the central concept, additional information in float-overs, and simple drop-down access to hierarchically arranged metadata. It's visually appealing and far more intuitive to end users who haven't been corrupted by a professional education. It also understands the language context for those global searchers out there.

· WiseNut (http://www.wisenut. com/), now owned by LookSmart, is a similar concept, but it avoids the visual feel and sticks to a text result display. Again, it's multilingual, with more than 25 languages, and is often listed in those speculative predictions of "Who's the next Google killer?" Simple searches result in the usual list of the top 10 sites that match your request. The brilliant innovation is the addition of a list of metadata derived from the WiseNut categories. For instance, if the end user searches on "stock," the top results are for stock market­type sites, but the WiseGuide Categories alert the user to more than 120 other ways to refine the search or to find stock photography, stock in soup recipes, stock cars, or livestock on farms. This brings value and efficiency to the initial search while adding no steps or confusion.

Visually Identifying Whether

I'm in the Right Place . . .

Have you searched and searched—only to find that you were searching a file or data set that was just the wrong place to be? It's like trying to find a subway station in New York with a map of Toronto. Try some of the pilot demonstrations of the tools at Antarcti.ca (http://antarcti.ca/), where you can see an amazing implementation of Antarcti.ca's VisualNet software on PubMed's version of Medline. For instance, newbie searchers might try to search PubMed for information about hospital administration—after all, it's all about medicine, right? MESH, viewed through the Antarcti.ca maps, shows you visually and simplythrough the size of the colored maps—the actual volume of information in the database on the topics it chooses to cover and focus on. This clearly is not Medline's forte. Drilling down through topics where PubMed excels is a pleasure, as additional Antarcti.ca algorithms lead you to key articles and references in the context of the whole body of information in the database. For end users who will never, ever learn MESH, this software has the potential to inoculate them from some, though not all, of the biggest searching mistakes.

Evaluating Quality—It's Not Easy

It's actually quite hard to evaluate quality in this world, where old brand names may or may not tell you something about the quality of their info, and new brands may still need to build their track record. There are a few emerging tools that can help us highlight some of the things we want end users to be aware of. I've found that Alexa Search is a great tool. Alexa (http://info.alexa.com) is a simple, downloadable plug-in that shows you useful information about the website you're viewing, such as

· Owner of the site

· Traffic ranking

· Number of hyperlinks going into the site

· Reviews of the site

· Number of pages in the site

There is the proverbial snowball's chance that information professionals will be able to stop the end user searching juggernaut. We probably don't want to. We can use it to our advantage, by marketing and recommending tools and techniques that help end users, while simultaneously and surreptitiously highlighting the reasons to use search professionals for advice and power searching for the mission-critical, higher-risk decisions. That's valuable enterprisewide marketing. In the coming issues of Information Outlook, I will be looking at other emerging or maybe-ready-for-prime-time technologies. I would be happy to hear from you; so, send me an e-mail.

Products mentioned are not endorsed by Stephen Abram, Micromedia ProQuest, or SLA. They are used here for illustrative purposes to highlight the types of technology opportunities that are coming to market.