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Last week I headed into London for Chinwag Live: Search vs Recommendation (sponsored by UK Trade and Investment and Sun Startup Essentials). The focus was on the consumer use of search technology versus recommendation web sites. The session was very well written up by Phil Wilkinson at Crowd Storm – “Shopping Search vs. Recommendation Sites” – with some excellent thoughts on the dynamics of what Phil describes as the circles of trust: Expertise, Authority and Experience.
I strongly agree with his thoughts on the interplay of search engines and recommendation sites. The fact is that people rely on both technologies to make their purchases, usually at different points in the buying cycle. Alan Patrick has a good discussion on the economics side on the Broadstuff blog. Interestingly, direct (human) recommendation still seems to dominate – even if it is via social media like Twitter - ultimately people still prefer to ask a friend.
But what about the Enterprise? Are we missing out in business? I’m not speaking about sales and marketing applications, or even about supply and sourcing, but about internal applications in knowledge management.
Search capabilities are often very siloed in the Enterprise, or at least incomplete across internal systems and applications. When we get on to the desktop seach is again fragmented (try searching inside spreadsheets as well as the inbox, contacts and files). OS X has some interesting functionality in this area; very suited for creative types and those of us who can never seem to remember where we filed things!
Recommendation provides significantly more intelligence that computing power can add today. The human element means that is can often outperform even the best search tools. This came across during the Q&A, where DSLR purchases seemed to be a common illustration (my photos from the session are in the Chinwag set here or extended out takes and arty shots here), as the questions spiraled up from understanding the content of the search, to understanding the context and broader semantic meaning.
Ultimately, search has to understand the intent of the searcher. Not just what they were after, but also why they were after it. This last piece is essential in delivering quality search results, since it shapes the best answer (rather than just ‘an answer’).
Humans do all of this automatically and intuitively: “Dave, do you know if we have any good sales proposal templates that would be good for a retail customer in the north of England?” We are a long way from getting that with a search engine, but recommendation and other social applications may well be beneficial to business for such applications.
A few more write ups (via the Chinwag team): Search vs Recommendation: different strokes for discovery? - the Chinwag Blog, Chinwag Live: Search versus Recommendation a no-brainer debate – Liberate Media, Search v. Review Sites – Wildfire, Chinwag live – recommendation and search -Hermione
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