Monday, February 20, 2006

Dreyfus: Problems with Search Engines

In chapter one Dreyfus talks about how the techniques search engines use "only have about a 10% chance of retrieving a useful document..." So that means that the other 90% is crap. Then he mentions about how library's are so great because they organize everything and you can browse to find a related topic, and sometimes you find something really interesting that you end up researching more. So I don't see why you can't do the same thing with the internet. If you just type in any topic word and get a mass of documents with that word then that could lead you on to other things where you finally find a worthy topic and document. Dreyfus is giving us too little credit when it comes to researching. When I type in a search I expect for some of the documents to be useful and some to be trash because I am depending on a machine with no common sense to find those for me. Then out of the select few I get to chose what is useful and what is not because I'm the intelligent one. I have to do some sort of work to get the information. So when Dreyfus says we should strive for technology that gives us 100% recall and 100% relevance, I say people are just getting lazy. If people don't want to sort through a few things on the internet, then why would they ever actually go to a library. I know I have asked a lot of questions here, does anyone a agree with that, or can they give me some insight that might change my mind?

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