February 07, 2005
Yahoo! Contextual Search
Yahoo! have relased the beta version of their Contextual Search, which goes by the moniker of Y!Q. Personally, I don't care for the name much as it would be easier to simply call it YQ or even YCS! I understand why they have the exclamation point in the middle of it (it is part of the Yahoo! trademark after all) but I think it looks silly.
But that's neither here nor there. Just my personal opinion.
Now you're probably asking yourself, What the heck is Contextual Search?
Basically it's a form of Plain Language Search, such as you see at AskJeeves or Vivisimo, where instead of typing in a search term you type in what you're looking for just as you would speak the question.
AskJeeves itself doesn't offer much in the way of clustering or contextual search, just the plain language portion of the equation. A little bit of clustering. In fact, AskJeeves doesn't even offer as much of the clustering effect as Teoma does, even though that's the data source that AJ uses. I've always thought that is just a bit odd. On the other hand, Teoma isn't really good with natural language searches.
Vivisimo does a bit more with Clustering, where related categories are shown as possible options. But frankly their pages get so cluttered that they're hard to work with. There is such a thing as too much information.
Yahoo's (sorry, no room for a ! hehheh) contextual search works on a similar principle. But instead of offering you potential related clusters, they strip certain portions of your request out and allow you to enable or disable those on the search results page. When you choose to enable or disable certain contextual phrases the results change, which could be valuable if they picked up on a word or words that you're not interested in.
What's it all mean? Not much really, since the technology is still in its infancy. And honestly not many people use it.
The bottom line is that computers still aren't nearly intuitive enough to correctly parse out the pertainent parts of your plain language questions. They do a pretty good job if you manage to get your most important words next to each other, but if you're going to do that you might as well simply type those keywords instead of an entire sentence!
Let's take a quick look at a couple of very similar searches to illustrate the point. Here's my (novice to search engines) plain language statement/question:
My daughter is having a birthday and her party is next week. How can I make and print invitations for the event?
Sounds logical doesn't it? Almost like what you would ask someone if you were standing in front of them and needed help or guidance.
The problem is that all of the methods mentioned above fail on this relatively simple request. Clustering doesn't work and neither does contextual search. The statement/question is too complicated for them to get the gist of it the same way a human would.
A human would automatically latch onto the most important words. Print, Birthday, Party and Invitations. However computers struggle with this logic since not all of the words are connected. Clustering comes up with no options if you search on that plain language phrasing. The best contextual search can do is realize you're asking about invitations. Nothing else though.
If however you leave out the extraneous details and keep it really simple by asking something like:
How can I make and print birthday party invitations?
they all do at least a decent job of sorting out what you want.
AskJeeves will return some pretty relevant sites, with the only related cluster being "Invitations For Free". Teoma will give you that one cluster and a few more, none of which are all that relevant frankly.
Vivisimo does okay by returning some relevant results and giving several related clusters.
YQ (sorry, no room for a ! LOL) actually does a better job that the above two. It gives you some relevant results and has managed to sort out three possible contextual portions of your search. Those being: birthday party invitation, party invitations and birthday party.
Not bad, not bad at all. Except that they all missed the fact that I was looking for a place that would allow me to print the invitations myself. A human wouldn't miss that tidbit of information, and IMO the search engines shouldn't either since it's actually connected to the phrase they're all picking up on.
Which leads us back to the original problem.
If I'm savvy enough to realize that I want to look for a way to print birthday party invitations, I might as well simply stick those four little words into the normal Yahoo!, Google or MSN Search. I'll find sites that offer what I'm looking for a lot more easily and considerably quicker. And type less to boot!
Will Contextual Search be something we'll see more of in the future? Maybe, maybe not. The underlying technology is going to have to improve an awful lot in order to make it viable.
In the meantime it might be easier to simply teach people how to search. ;)