Does anybody even bother asking why ENOUGH times?
Why is Google on top? Search
Why is search so important? People have questions and search is one way of getting answers? (there are legion other ways, including browse, invention, and non sequitur)
Why are answers so valuable? They are the most rational, comprehensible way of alleviating the emotional anxiety that questions pose. (There are other ways of responding to that anxiety–that curiosity; they include emotional manipulation, distraction, emergence of new questions, irrelevance.)
My point is this. Search is not Googles only weapon. Of equal and possibly greater import is the I feel Lucky option.
The human being is not simply a robot serving only the immediate need for a rational response to a tactical query, but a complex organic milieu of emotion, novelty, irrational exuberance and defiance, and technology, however traditionally rational in its iterative design, is not the last best pattern, but the first pattern made by those very confused and fleshy organisms that work at google. In our lifetime, the simplistic binary nature of computing will seem laughable, and people will be reminded that that binary mathematics it is based on is nearly as old as electricity itself.
Should the designers choose, it is merely a tight left turn, on the order of a decade or less of work, for any person to author that irrational machine, and it is the pattern of humans to appeal to it as they may with all, or other faculties than the rational. We shouldn’t be looking for the next rational predictor, we should be loooking for the pattern maker, the Lakoff+”rapid prototype” that allows us to home construct our own frames, and our own rose colored search/browse/I-feel-lucky result set.
Emotion is hot on the heels of the purely cognitive gen 1 one of the computing experience, exploration, and challege will be next.
Think of google’s ” were you looking for..” suggesting something interesting rather than relevant. Also see “design for debate”, and you’ll understand where I’m coming from.
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