CHAPTER TWO
Searching

Search changes who we are. Understanding how search affects us requires that we have an explicit understanding of how humans search and why. Rather than an activity that happens relatively infrequently, as part of a process of research or to answer a specific question, search is central to what makes us thinking humans and allows us to work socially. To understand this, we need to understand what people do when they are actively searching, as well as the context in which search occurs. Search is so much a part of who we are as people and as societies that it often remains unexamined. This is particularly unfortunate when the task of searching and the place of search have changed so rapidly over the last few decades.

There are at least three questions we can ask about the search process. The first of these deals with the concrete issue of how people enter items into a search engine query box and how they interpret the results. This interaction at the interface level is of particular interest to the designers of search engines, and tells us a lot about search engines, the people who use them, and how we all think about our world. The broader question is why people search, what motivates them to look for certain material on a search engine, and whether they are in some way satisfied by what they find. Finally, we might ask whether the mere existence of a search engine changes what people want to look for, and their social values and expectations. That is, do the motivations surrounding search change with the existence of particular kinds of search technologies?

A more complete understanding of the search engine requires that we look at search from a variety of perspectives. The perspective of the "user" is an obvious starting point - or at least should be. Often the design and evaluation of search is done from the designers' perspectives or using metrics of interest to the researcher (Spink 2002). Rather than trusting designers' innate understanding of the problem of the search process, and their internalized models of who might be using their system, user-centered design requires an iterative process of understanding what the user expects and creating systems that help to satisfy users' needs and desires.

There are problems with this approach, one of which is assuming that users do not also change to adapt to systems. Douglas Engelbart, who may be considered the father of the user interface, long argued that information systems and users co-evolve (Engelbart & Lehtman 1988). His work at Stanford, which brought about the mouse, hyperlinking, word processing, and dozens of other elements of the modern interface that we now take for granted, was oriented toward tools that would augment "the capability of humans to deal with tough knowledge work and to process effectively the large volumes of information with which knowledge workers must deal." He suggested that, as a community became accustomed to particular interfaces, they created new needs. New online services lead to new capabilities among the user base, and new desires to be fulfilled. It is not enough to react to the user, or create systems that respond to existing needs; the designer must understand the current user, and at the same time anticipate how the system might change the user.

The perfect search

Even if the perfect interface does not exist in real life, it persists in our dreams. This dream interface usually comes in two forms. One form is the conversational agent that is as good as a real librarian. We met Vox and Dr. Know in the first chapter, and, more recently, Spike Jonze's Her (2013) provides a version of that dream. When asked how she works, "Samantha" replies: "Well, basically I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me, but what makes me 'me,' is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I'm evolving, just like you." When her "user" notes that this idea is really weird, she assures him "you'll get used to it." Because, while it is strange to think of a computer having this ability to evolve, it is perfectly natural for us to accept this from the (other) people we interact with. In this view, the machine and the human learn together, and build from experience. Rather than being limited to a single query and a specific answer (though this is also possible), the system adapts and probes and questions, trying to fill in gaps and discover answers. Search is done through conversation. Unfortunately, even this sort of ideal of a search engine as an intelligent conversational agent is not perfect. Our interactions with humans can be at least as frustrating as our interactions with machines, and communication is always marked by imperfect understanding.

Perhaps, then, the ideal device is one that knows what you mean: a perfect brain-machine interface, a search engine that knows what you are thinking. This is hardly a new dream. The ability to communicate to another person exactly what you mean has been an objective of just about every philosophy of every culture. Umberto Eco, in his Search for the perfect language (1995), recounts some of these attempts, from recovering lost "original languages," to constructing logical grammars for philosophy or model universal languages. There is some of this dream of a philosophical language in current efforts toward the construction of "ontologies" and the "semantic web." This is not the first time new technologies were considered the gateway to "angelic speech," or mind-to-mind communication. The radio, for example, was seen as a way to link up minds so that a new global understanding might be reached (J. D. Peters 1999). H. G. Wells (1938) imagined a "World Encyclopedia" that would provide common understanding across topics, and as a result lead to world peace. In this view, the ideal search interface does not need to draw inferences from the keywords you provide or engage you in conversation; it knows just what you mean.

The difficulty is that the searcher does not always know precisely what she means; if she did, she would have little need of searching. The word "search" suggests that a person is interested in finding something that has been lost. People do use search engines for this, particularly to "re-find" information that they may already have encountered on the web, but more often they are hoping not to "find" but to "learn," or to "discover." Perhaps, then, the ideal search engine does not just understand what you desire, but knows what the user wants even when she does not know herself. That is a conundrum, but may not be an insurmountable challenge. Social signals may provide this kind of suggestion for those who do not know what they do not know. Search technologies capable of doing this also tend to undermine personal and social will in pernicious ways.

At present, though, effective search requires that the searcher commands the experience necessary to identify appropriate query terms and utilize multiple approaches to arrive at a set of results, and then to rapidly evaluate those results to determine which are most likely to provide the appropriate and accurate answer. Given the lack of a "perfect" search engine, much of the quality of the search experience today relies on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of users who come to the search engine. Accessing the web is now easier than ever, although it is certainly easier for some than it is for others. Even as the network continues to reach out across the globe, a second-level digital divide becomes clearer, between those who are skilled users of the internet and those who are not. Different people have different aptitudes and different patterns of use when it comes to searching the web, and so it is a more useful resource to some than it is to others (Hargittai 2002a).

A large part of that has to do with digital literacy more broadly: being good at searching requires more than being able to use a search engine well, even if web search is seen by many as the most prominent part of digital literacy (Alexander, Adams Becker, & Cummins 2016). A good searcher needs to have a mental model of how the web is organized, and how the search engine relates to that structure. She needs to be able to critically analyze the problem she is seeking to address, and be able to evaluate, summarize, and make use of the resources she finds. In other words, use of a search engine is one important part of a broader repertoire of searching skills, which in turn is part of a broader range of literacies. There are reasons to be concerned about the variability of such skills, particularly given the kind of effect this has on educational, occupational, and health outcomes. There are some hopeful signs that digital literacy is improving across the board (Eshet-Alkalai & Chajut 2009), and, at the same time, search engines have reduced the need for some of the technical knowledge previously required to use them most effectively. But the question of matching skilled searchers with capable tools will always be with us.

Searching skills

It is commonly believed that searching requires no skill at all, and even now people tend to believe that "digital natives," those who grew up with web access throughout their childhood, have had sufficient exposure to search engines to have natural expertise. While young...