Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Good lecture online from Berkeley

Sept 17, 2007 What People Think About When Searching - Dr. Daniel Russell: Google

He was a guest lecturer in the Berkeley course INFO 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business. He talked about some of the challenges to figuring out what people want from their searches in Google. For example
  • when a person is on the Google home page and types in google as a search term, what do they want?
  • since people don't notice most of the things on a screen how do they guide the user to the right part of the screen? 
  • chronological ordering the results of a Scholar search is difficult at best and impossible when the publishers don't include dates in their metadata
  • people's skills are very uneven because they learn search skills from someone else (not the manual)
  • building an advanced search page that doesn't scare people is very difficult

He also talks about how they do their user observation studies.

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