[Search-l] users, folks and search

[Gérard Dupont]

Hi,
Since few months, I was too busy to send any comment on the mailing list,
but I'm catching up the numerous search-I mail digest. Well, I'm quite
surprise to see so much discussion around advertisement, business model and
other (paid) people enhanced search engine (or web directory) ! Where are
the end-users in all  those issues ? Where are you trying to tackle there
needs and finding bright ideas to do so ? I mean, when I joined this mailing
list in December, I was looking for something big and original still now I
did not find it...

Ok, I did not my part of contribution and you can blame me for that, but I'm
trying to come back full of ideas !

Anyway, in my point of view why should we involve real people and folks in
search engine ? As far as I read you (no offense to anyone I hope) were
proposing that the crawl and indexation process could benefits from people
for finding hided sites (the dark part of web or something like that) and
moreover filter what we can call "spamSpamSpam" sites (because I don't have
any better english translation in my pocket now). Bright ideas and I hope
the work can get deeper in that way.

But is that all ? Looking to other initiative of people enhanced search
tools, the most promising task where people can be involve is simply search
! I mean why is it mostly better to ask human to search instead of machine :
because they better understand what we want, because they know the "meaning"
of our search query. How many people have tried to find something in a
public library search tool and never reach anything because our
understanding of the problem (finding the needed information) what to far
from the understanding of the machine ? (Well perhaps I'm alone in that
case... anyway) And then asking a (not too dumb) librarian and pfiuu, after
2 or 3 queries he find it !

What I want to highlight here is that we need to look toward how we search
and how machine can understand what we are looking. Using the community not
only to find content but also (and I think that the most important point) to
understand what we search. There is some strong relation to semantic, some
with the actual semantic web trends (something new for the journalists to
make big title around wikia !) and a lot with knowledge.

I have some other ideas and if there is some interests here, I will try to
find time to explain them.

G.Dupont

PS : All of you are doing a great job here and I believe in the project
despite all the $ discussion. I hope that it could become something as big
as one half of wikipedia and I could be proud to say "hey I was on the
mailing list !"
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