Future Trends in Search User Interfaces

Transcription

1 Future Trends in Search User Interfaces Dr. Marti Hearst UC Berkeley i-know Conference Keynote Sept 1, 2010

2 Forecasting the Future First: What are the larger trends? In technology? In society? Next: Project out from these.

3 Latent preferences for audio and video Wide adoption of touchactivated devices with excellent UI design Wide adoption of social media and user-generated content Natural Interfaces Increasingly available rich, integrated data sources Improvements in NLP, speech recognition via huge data sets Wide adoption of mobile devices with data service 3

4 Trend: Natural Interfaces What does this mean for Search UIs? Longer, more natural queries Including sloppy commands Social Search Better Mobile Interfaces Audio (spoken) queries and results Context-sensitive results Longer term: Video and audio dominating text Dialogue / conversational interactions 4

5 Trend: More Natural Queries

6 Trend: Longer, more natural queries The research suggests people prefer to state their information need rather than use keywords. But after first using a search engine they quickly learned that full questions resulted in failure. Average query length continues to increase Major search engines are now handling long queries well. Information worded as questions is increasing on the web. From social question-answering sites and forums. 6

7 A recent example: keywords failed 7

8 A recent example: ask as a question 8

9 A recent example: get an answer 9

10 Advanced user interface design 10

11 Trend: More Natural Queries Blend two ideas: sloppy commands predictions based on user behavior data This is subtly and steadily increasing in sophistication across many interfaces 11

12 Sloppy Commands Like command languages, but the user has a lot of flexibility in expression so memorization is not required time graz what time is it in graz graz time now 12

13 Sloppy Commands + Visual Feedback Can include rich visual feedback Quicksilver in Apple Inky by Miller et al. 13

14 Sloppy Commands + Rich Data Combine Mozilla s Ubiquity and Freebase to make a flexible predictive query engine By spencerwaterbed: 14

15 Sloppy Commands + Rich Data Combine Mozilla s Ubiquity and Freebase to make a flexible predictive query engine By spencerwaterbed: 15

16 Far Future Trend: Dialogue We re still far away. SIRI is promising as a move forward; based on stateof-the-art research. 16

17 Trend: Social Search People are Social; Computers are Lonely. Don t Personalize Search, Socialize it!

18 Social Search Implicit: Suggestions generated as a side-effect of search activity. Asking: Communicating directly with others. Explicit: knowledge accumulating via the deliberate contributions of many. Collaborative: Working with other people on a search task. 18

19 Trend: Social Search Social ranking Explicitly recommended Digg, StumbleUpon Delicious, Furl Google s SearchWiki Implicitly recommended Click-through People who bought Yahoo s MyWeb (now Google Social Search) 19

20 Social Search: Implicit Suggestions Human-generated suggestions still beat purely machine-generated ones Spelling suggestions Query term suggestions ( search as you type ) Recommendations (books, movies, etc) Ranking (using clickthrough statistics) 20

21 Social Search: Asking for Answers What do people ask of their social networks? Type % Example Recommendation 29% Opinion 22% Building a new playlist any ideas for good running songs? I am wondering if I should buy the Kitchen-Aid ice cream maker? Factual 17% Anyone know a way to put Excel charts into LaTeX? Rhetorical 14% Why are men so stupid? Invitation 9% Who wants to go to Navya Lounge this evening? Favor 4% Social connection 3% Need a babysitter in a big way tonight anyone?? I am hiring in my team. Do you know anyone who would be interested? Offer 1% Could any of my friends use boys size 4 jeans? Morris et al., CHI

22 Social Search: Explicit Help via Question-Answering Sites Content is produced in a manner amenable to searching for answers to questions. Search tends to work well on these sites and on the internet leading to these sites Like an FAQ but with many authors, and with the questions that the audience really wants the answers to, and written in the language the audience wants to use. 22

23 Social Search: Seeing what people you know have seen Yahoo MyWeb, Google Social Search 23

24 Social Search: Explicit Suggestions Building Knowledge Social knowledge management tools seem promising Utilize the best of social networks, tagging, blogging, web page creation, wikis, and search. Millen et al., CHI

25 Social Search: People Collaborating Tools to help with this are only just beginning. Pickens et al., SIGIR

26 Future Trend: The Decline of Text Or: the rise of audio/video The cultural heavy lifting in America is moving from text to audio and video. Video and audio are now easy to produce and share. Pew: Use of video sharing sites doubled from YouTube: Video responses apparently arose spontaneously Videos for presidential debates were mundane. Millions of video views; no where near this number for article readings Pew: Marketing s with podcasts 20% more likely to be opened. Movies with subtitles do poorly in the U.S. Newspaper web sites are starting to look like TV. (Full essay at 26

27 Future Trend: The Decline of Text and Rise of Audio/Video Other advantages Doesn t require literacy (but can serve as a bridge) Robust video devices to teach agricultural techniques What about the popularity of texting? An interesting counter-trend Especially popular among youth Cheap Can be done surreptitiously (Full essay at 27

28 Future Trend: The Decline of Text and Rise of Audio/Video What is currently solved: Ease of creating and sharing videos What needs improvement Editing tools The main impediments to more fully replacing text are: The need for better search and scanning of audio and video A means for silent audio input What about the popularity of texting? An interesting counter-trend Especially popular among youth Cheap Can be done surreptitiously (Full essay at 28

29 Future Trends not so much? Personalization Visualization some breakthroughs are needed. 29

30 Summary As CS gets more sophisticated, we can build search interfaces that allow people to interact more naturally: More language-like queries Speaking & hearing rather than typing & reading More able to interact with other people while doing search tasks More able to use the knowledge in peoples heads 30

31 Thank you! Marti Hearst UC Berkeley Book full text freely available at: