I'm back on IDEO's Edges to talk through the different modalities of search tools -- from platform marketplaces to LLM to social media, and more! It's a longer read so here are some major points:
🔎 The Platform Marketplace: the classic model of search. Platforms that bring together searchers and answerers together in a mutually beneficial exchange (think: Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc). They are great! But no one is getting paid to answer your specific question, so the cognitive load of sorting through imperfect information is real.
☎ LLM, The Answer Machine: Think of the Star Trek Computer composing infallible answers out of nowhere. This is most people's mental model for LLM-supported search tools (which ChatGPT is used for); this reduces the cognitive load of search, but introduces a whole host of other problems. Where is the information coming from? How is it being summarized? Also, an LLM chatbot doesn't direct traffic to other sites. This represents a fundamental challenge to the search business model. Why would a publisher let a bot scrape its data for free if it's not getting traffic in return? I talk about how this could change the nature of the web, and also if SearchGPT poses a way forward.
🎲 Prediction Markets and Social Navigation: How do we codify the social knowledge inherent in seeing the line around the block for a restaurant and assuming that it's going to have good food? Review sites like Yelp are one place to start, but what about more ambiguous inquiries? I talk about the increasing role of speculation in digital experiences, and how prediction markets represent an interesting search use case based on a more collective, crowd-sourced model, even if they are somewhat useless as an archive for things that have already happened.
📱 Social Media: We all thought TikTok was going to replace search engines, but then it didn't! I dig into some reasons why, and the real ways social media sites have pushed traditional search engines to broaden the aperture of results to include more multi-modal (videos, images, etc) responses. People are asking different kinds of questions online, and social media is one reason why.
I'm curious to hear if there are more tools you're using to find out about stuff! What'd I miss? What would you add?
https://lnkd.in/eVhF2hxh
#AI #search