The Kitchen Sink Weblog: Tales from Sun's internet facing edge

Note: This is another entry in the series of blogs I've written about Gartner's ITxpo event. I've captured thoughts and notes from selected sessions I attended. The below is from the "The Evolution of Taxonomies and Search Information Access"

Most people love Google. It's simple, uncluttered page appeals to many, and the results make it as the search engine of choice. But there is dark side to this success. Because the expectation it has set in the minds of millions is a curse, according to Gartner's Dr. Rita Knox.

What is the curse? The first is the expectation that everything is searchable. The more saavy of us know that Google doesn't index everything. For example it can have a tough time with dynamic data locked up a database. The second part is that expectation that search results should be 1-10 of N. If your search is narrowly targeted, this works. But for general searches it returns too much information to sift through.

In the CEO Mastermind Interview at the event, Steve Ballmer asked why couldn't search learn about him (the user) as he used it? I'm sure the reader will come up with better examples, but here's one to illustrate: if I search for "rye" do I mean rye bread or rye whiskey? If google knew I was a enthusiast of different types of whiskey, it would know. It would have that context about me. Of course that would mean that it would know my identity/profile .. which is a whole other conversation.

Rita agrues that for search to be more useful, you need to allow the user to provide context for the search ... or at least organize the results into verticals. We aren't fulfilling her version, but here at Sun, we have taken some steps towards this. If you now use sun.com's search you will see that the results are organized in tabs. Recently we rolled out this feature for the developer sites. Has it been useful to you? I'm curious.