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20041123 星期二 2004年11月23日

Feeling about IAsk - user experience based search engine

These days, one of the Chinese Portal - Sina's knowledge base search engine IAsk debut.

I am really interested in this new launched program. Their rules is very simple and straight forward. People can raise any kind of question here, and give some mark to that question to award the person who give the right(or appropriate) answers. Other people will try to solve the question and get the award. People who raised the question will give the mark according to the reply. Of course, the higher mark the people give, the more exposure the question will have. In China, there's many website who provided such kind of service before, but none of them combined it with a powerful search engine.

Now, more and more people are interested in the "game". And I often try to get what I wanna to know from it, when I encounter some problem, I even directly goto iAsk but not Google :P.

So, is it another search engine? Absolutely yes. Nowadays, there's more and more search engines, but how to get the knowledge is the most important thing I think. Google will crawler billions of web pages, but are all of these pages useful? I don't think so. I don't think we must give user as many as result they searched, but should give them what they really want. I think user's experience and knowledge is more valuable than these web pages. 80% people will care the same thing about one specfic question. For example, when talking about the word "mortagage", you and I maybe will has the same puzzle and will raise the similar question. And my experience maybe is just what you wanna to know. Without question, if more and more users take part in this program and contribute their wisdom and experience, the knowledge base will be more and more rich and valuable and this search engine will be more and more clear and can will give the user what they wanna to know.

So I think, in this .search period (related to .com) , how to attract the user, collecting their data and experience is the most important. Contrast to the search technique, the knowledge base is more important.

To summarize, I think what we can learn from iAsk is:
1) Use award mark to attract user to take part in and contribute their knowledge;
2) Combine the user knowledge base with the powerful search engine.

Just my cents. ( 2004年11月23日, 02:36:12 下午 GMT+08:00 ) Permalink 评论 [6]
评论:

>So, is it another search engine? Absolutely >yes. Nowadays, there's more and more search >engines, but how to get the knowledge is the >most important thing I think. I just read your article for the third time, really iASK is a fabolous idea and work, I think SINA starts to show his widom about choosing new coming service. But I also got confused about your article and maybe majorly your conceptions. iASK is not a search engine. Speak from the technical aspect, it is just a web site which using his own inside search engine, the more important point is the approach to establish such expert information database, but not search engine. What I wanna say? Along with the improved acknowledgment about the information in the cyberspace, people would not be satisfied only at the search service like the one Google provided. We see that google just announced a new search service called Google Scholar, by the way it is very useful, but I am not a member of IEEE or ACM, so I can only see there is the paper, but I cannot download, SO I just turn at to some free paper download sites, like citeseer. I mean the search engine tech is more and more becoming an infrastructure, and I think search tech would not be mysterous anymore, maybe in the future, in JxEE there would be the support lib for optimized search. I totally agree with that how to get the knowledge is more and more important, but it cannot cover all the case. Search tech is now the necessary point for any vast information management system. The website is just the most popular and characterized prototype. There would be no .Search period, but there would the post-search period. Lots of web service will grow up for the development of search tech, and also many existing web services will start to need the search tech and use it. But anyway, the idea is the point, like iASK.:)

发表于 Winters Mi 在 2004年11月24日, 06:00 下午 GMT+08:00 #

there is no technology in sina, so there is no search engine in sina. hiahia

发表于 chenqj 在 2004年11月24日, 09:37 下午 GMT+08:00 #

Hi Winters, thanks for your feedback, please see my comments.

1) About the search engine. I don't agree with you about the term search engine. What's search engine? Just Google, Yahoo? No, I don't think so. <strong>I think what ever that people can get knowledge from with some question or keyword is a search engine</strong>. For example, some can search keyword with the result of ASCII chart, some can translate the keyword to the inter search, some can answer simple question... In my opinion, all of this is such engine. How ever, everyone has his own defination , so, it's not the problem :-).

2) About the search tech. I agree that search is more and more becoming an infrastructure, so, we can simply use nutch and lucene to implement a &quot;small&quot; Google :P. But I don't think search is mature now, so, I don't think it's the post search period. :-). Speaking as a common user, what I care most is whether the current search engine can give me what I want more precise and more concise? I think the answer is no. Try to imagine some day when I stand at the street corner and wanna to use my cell phone to search something from the internet, my display area and patience are all limited. What I what it displayed is just what I really needed. I really believe it will be the reality. (BTW: I heard Google already has such mobile search demo, but I can not test it here. what a pity.) And when the palm device become more and more popular, I think this is the problem. Then just talk about the search in our pc, is it enough? I don't think so. For example, I wanna to know Yao Ming's height, let's search it from Google, I should type &quot;Yao Ming Height&quot; and I can get the answer from the third link. What I want is: I type &quot;Yao Ming's height?&quot;, it will display &quot;7-6&quot; so so. That means, it should be more smarter, maybe I am a little greedy. :P

3) About the idea. Absolutely agree! It's the point.

发表于 Elan Meng 在 2004年11月24日, 10:51 下午 GMT+08:00 #

I think I know where is our contradiction.
1) It is along with our definition about the search engine. But I do not think it is a good idea to integrate the search engine and search services, which like iASK. Search engine just provided the result according to the search method, and search service more provided the information organization, presentation and interaction. Like database, we use SQL search the records in database, but we cannot call it a search engine, we call it database, because it is in charge of responsibily more than just search. :) And think about data warehouse, although industry people think less about that tech, it uses search as one of its basis, but it does not provide any search interface, therefore we can see the infrastructure as search engine is.
2) I agree with you that we more and more need the smarter search service. But I think we should get more clear thought that we are talking about the information organization, presentation and interaction, which is more requested in the cyberspace. So nowadays we got BLOG, WALLOP, MULTIPLY. We are losing faith about the search result of Google, but we still are fancinated about google's story, why, because it does. And google shows the ambition and preview of such web society where people could get the information for free. Simple search service cannot satisify people's demand any more, so we have to use the facility - search - to establish more smart and mature services for people. Search is no more the key point, I still think so, but what service should not have the search tech undertaking. It is just the service, it is still the web. :)

发表于 Winters Mi 在 2004年11月25日, 12:25 上午 GMT+08:00 #

By the way, about your annoucement under the title, that should be Personal Opinions Only but not Personal Option Only, unless you want to express another thought, :)

发表于 Winters Mi 在 2004年11月25日, 12:29 上午 GMT+08:00 #

Thanks, Winters, it's a typo :-)

Yes, I agree with you that our contradiction is how to define the term "search engine" , "search service" and scope of these terms. And do you think there's much sense to differentiate the term?&nbsp; Maybe I stand for the common user who just need the result and you stand for the engineer who will give user this result. How ever, it's not important, let it be.

As to the mature search tech issues. I recall some words when I glanced at an article about IE &amp; Firefox yesterday. "Please never think that an technology is mature", what I want to say is "so does search". Just take a look at browser, when IE dominate the world, almost everybody said:"oh, the brower is no more the point, the point is how to develop service on it.". If all people think that way, Mozilla, Firebox would never born. :P, nowadays IE are more and more feeling the threat from Firefox. And I think if Google doesn't make any progress on the base search, it will fall into that jam too. However, just a few days ago, Google changed it's ranking algorithm and some other issues, so, it's looks still a spirited young man but not a wrinkly :P

Of course, service based on search is very important too, and that's a field that idea is more important I think. :-)

发表于 Elan Meng 在 2004年11月25日, 04:30 下午 GMT+08:00 #

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