Keywords vs "natural language"

"Do you have a timetable for the bus to the airport?" my wife asked the hotel concierge.

"Turn left out of the hotel, first left towards Waverley Station, and it's right in front of you" replied the concierge.

Why so irrelevant? Because people operate on keywords and the concierge was used to hearing the words "bus" and "airport" and it meaning "how do I get from here to the bus for the airport?"

As Robert Cialdini tells us in Influence, life and especially social interactions are complex so we develop shortcuts that let us navigate that complexity without forever needing to analyse each situation on its merits. Shortcuts like social proof - watching what other people do and doing the same - or consistency - remembering what we usually do and doing it again - are incredibly powerful (indeed necessary) tools for navigating complexity. (They are also, as Cialdini tells us, very easy for skilled "compliance professionals" to abuse - see Scott Adams' "how to" on abusing consistency here.)

A friend of mine mentioned last week that keywords work for another reason - people have basically visual memories and keywords are how we store things. This is why memory palaces work so well as a mnemonic aid. 

Keyword-based search works so well, so intuitively, because if you watch people interact with other people you'll see them watch out for the keywords too. Google's trick wasn't to invent anything - it was just to pay attention to how we were doing things already and then train computers to do it too. Which really isn't good news for all the people striving to make search work more like "natural language". Some elements of conversation might operate along the lines of natural language, but search isn't a form of online speech (there's plenty of that already with email and IM and Twitter and VoIP). Search is online memory, and anyone trying to supplant keywords as the way people remember things is barking up very much the wrong tree.

Comments

[Friendly Ghost]

At least Google seems to have finally decided that people aren't bots: check out this post, in which it's claimed that typing 'spam assassin' yielded a bot response! It would appear to have since been fixed, although it's doing the rounds at digg right now.

The idea of intelligent search engines - more intuitive than keywords - is a fascinating one. Check out my post on the subject.