E-commerce and The End of Search

With the advent of the Internet and the massive amount of information available, we needed to find a way to make it accessible for consumption. Thus, the World Wide Web was born and gave us the capability to present different types of data including text, images and multimedia to the user through the web browser. As the amount of information increased exponentially, it became apparent the information needed to be categorized and organized.

Yahoo was one of the pioneers in this area, looking to create a directory of the Internet. Unfortunately this model was not scalable; others like Altavista and Lycos took a different approach, the same approach used by Google: Creating algorithms that searched and indexed the content on the Internet, providing consumers of information a central place to search that information. The search engine was born.

Most of us consider the Internet a bucket of miscellaneous tidbits, and the modern search engine our personal assistant. But is that analogy correct? You open your browser, bringing up the Google homepage, then enter whatever term you happen to be looking for at the time and bingo. You get a list of results you then have to “search” through to find what you are looking for. So in fact you are searching through the results of what Google searched for.

Google co-founder Larry Page once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want”, far from what Google is today.

Searching is not something that comes natural to people. In fact, people actually hate searching. People like to know where stuff is. Throughout our lives we establish systems to store and retrieve information efficiently.

After running across a picture taken eight years ago, of my three-year-old organizing his loot on Halloween night, I realized that we “organize”so we can find. This is very important–we organize so we can later find.

It’s all around us. Our fridge has a specific drawer where we store our vegetables and another for the cheese and ham, the top shelf for the milk and the door for the juice. Our supermarkets have shelves and products are categorized and organized to make it easy for us to find. Imagine what it would be like to go to a grocery store where products weren’t organized in any way.

The search engine is just not compatible with the way people function, it is just a first step to deal with and filter the amount of information on the Internet.  The reality is, it is rudimentary and primitive.

A recent study titled “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” by researchers at Columbia, Harvard and Wisconsin-Madison universities studied whether the Internet has become our primary transitive memory source–basically an external memory system. These are the conclusions reached by the four controlled experiments in the study:

1) People share information easily because they rapidly think of computers when they find they need knowledge (Expt. 1).

2) The social form of information storage is also reflected in the findings that people forget items they think will be available externally, and remember items they think will not be available (Expts. 2 and 3).

3) Transactive memory is also evident when people seem better able to remember which computer folder an item has been stored in than the identity of the item itself (Expt. 4).

The effect on whether or not we choose to commit certain information to memory when we know the information is readily available on the computer is what is relevant here. We store specific things in specific places, like food in the fridge, but who remembers what is specifically in the fridge?

It is completely natural for people to minimize what needs to be encoded into memory by organizing and then encoding the location of the information, rather than the information itself. This is where search engines fall short of meeting the basic cognitive needs of humans.

The emergence of the mobile device has been remarkable and Apple’s vision in this space has changed the way people access information. There is data to support the notion that people are not mirroring desktop behavior on mobile devices.

People are not searching on smartphones as much as they do on desktops. Steve Jobs attributes this to the availability of mobile apps and the desktop lacking an app store. In reality, the availability of app, or the lack thereof, is not really the central point. What’s important is information is being categorized, compartmentalized and organized for consumption, and delivered more efficiently through mobile devices. This is clearly a step in the right direction in delivering more relevant and timely information to the user.

Artificial Intelligence will play a major role in the next wave of innovation, starting with Evolving and Adaptive Fuzzy Systems as classification algorithms and then matching the wants with the needs of the user. A recent example of this is an application that gives personalized restaurant recommendations called Alfred—it is all recommendations and no direct search.

GiftWoo takes the next step forward in the e-commerce space in a vertical market. Until now going online to find a gift for your better half involves a search, which results in thousands of choices. Currently, e-commerce websites are designed to deliver a high number of choices, rather than the “right choice” for the consumer. GiftWoo will give the buyer the unique and perfect gift they seek without the searching, by initially building a profile for the gift recipient, then utilizing a proprietary algorithm to match the ideal gift to the profile.