Technical activity automatically eliminates every nontechnical activity or transforms it into technical activity. This does not mean, however, that there is any conscious effort or directive will. Jacques Ellul
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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