Eleven Minutes
By Joseph Janes
American Libraries Columnist���
Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for���August 2005
I’d love to tell you all the fascinating things I heard at Microsoft this spring. I was invited to join a group of about 30 experts in various aspects of the search world to spend a couple of days interacting with the MSN Search team. It was quite a crowd—search engine marketers and optimizers, some researchers, several bloggers and new media types, a venture capitalist, a copyright/public domain activist . . . and me.
So far as I could tell, I was the only���“expert searcher”���there. I even started channeling Nancy Pearl: In a small-group session brainstorming ways to help people find blogs, I found myself saying it was fundamentally a reader’s advisory problem, and they should be paying attention not only to topic and author but also genre and appeal characteristics. Not sure they got that one.
Secretive searches
Anyway, I’d love to be able to tell you all that went on, but I can’t. Part of the price of entry was a nondisclosure agreement that would make your hair stand on end. (At least I got a nice dinner and some swag.) I have to say that our hosts at MSN were very gracious and almost���free of defensiveness as we asked challenging questions and picked away at their products, decisions, plans, strategy, and so on. It was a fun and exhausting time, and I’m glad I was able to go.
I did pick up several tidbits that I can talk about, mostly from the other participants. For example, did you know that it takes about a year of effort to get a website in the first page of results in a search engine? Got that one over drinks with a British search-engine manipulator—I mean, “marketer.”
Lingering over results
What has stayed with me the most, though, is 11 minutes. This got tossed off during a session—apparently, an internal MSN study found that’s the average time people spend scanning through results after doing an internet search.
I don’t know about you, but that seems like an awfully long time. Mind you, we librarians are sophisticated information folk, with lots of experience, so I’d assume we’re quicker. Even so, 11 minutes?
I’ve been ruminating on what could be done in those minutes. Lots of technologically driven ideas got suggested, like automatic query modification, use of natural-language processing techniques, and so on. All very interesting, of course.
What could we���contribute to that time, though? Several possibilities have occurred to me, the most captivating of which has been question negotiation. Since people are already taking quite a bit of time in searching and scanning through results, could some of that time be used instead to help them refine what they are actually looking for?
Of course, people don’t begin searches knowing it will take 11 minutes (and bear in mind that’s an average, so lots of people are spending considerably more than that), so the question-negotiation notion might be a tough sell. Would people recognize its potential value and sit still for it? Moreover, is there a way to make the process scalable? Can what we know about refining information needs be distilled?
Honestly, I don’t know. There’s been debate for decades about the art versus science of reference interviewing. Maybe it is uniquely interpersonal and situational; maybe there are aspects or features that will scale to help the hundreds of millions of people a day who do internet searches.
Perhaps some enterprising and entrepreneurial student will read this and develop a tool, opening a new chapter in librarianship. (If so, I want my 10% for the idea.)
This might not even be the best, or only, approach. But it does feel like an opportunity to recognize that substantial amounts of time are being spent in what seems superficially to be instant internet searching, and to position ourselves as time-savers in that realm, in whatever ways seem fruitful.
Opening the floor
Hard as it is to believe, this begins my fourth year writing this column, and the internet, reason notwithstanding, continues unabated. I thought it might be worth trying a column or two this year where I answer some questions from readers. In lesser hands this would be seen as laziness in coming up with topics; I prefer to call it���“responsiveness.” You be the judge. Obviously, I can’t answer questions individually; but sufficiently provocative, challenging, or fun questions might well appear in this space in months to come. Do your worst and watch the skies . . . and perhaps you could be another story. . . .
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