Future Trendsin

Search UserInterfaces

Dr. Marti HearstUC Berkeley

i-Know Conference Keynote Sept 1, 2010

Forecasting the Future

First: What are the larger trends?

In technology?In society?

Next: Project out from these.

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NaturalInterfaces

Wide adoption of touch-activated devices withexcellent UI design

Latent preferencesfor audio and video

Wide adoption ofmobile devices withdata service

Wide adoption ofsocial media anduser-generatedcontent

Improvements inNLP, speechrecognition viahuge data sets

Increasinglyavailable rich,integrated datasources

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Trend: Natural InterfacesWhat 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

Trend: More Natural Queries

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Trend: Longer, more natural queries

The research suggests people prefer to state theirinformation 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 theweb. From social question-answering sites and forums.

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A recent example: keywords failed

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A recent example: ask as a question

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A recent example: get an answer

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Advanced user interface design

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Trend: More Natural Queries

Blend two ideas:

“sloppy commands”

predictions based on user behavior data

This is subtly and steadily increasing insophistication across many interfaces

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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”

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Sloppy Commands + Visual Feedback

Can include rich visual feedback

Quicksilver in Apple

Inky by Miller et al.

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Sloppy Commands + Rich Data

Combine Mozilla’s Ubiquity and Freebase tomake a flexible predictive query engine By spencerwaterbed: http://vimeo.com/13992710

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Sloppy Commands + Rich Data

Combine Mozilla’s Ubiquity and Freebase tomake a flexible predictive query engine By spencerwaterbed: http://vimeo.com/13992710

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Far Future Trend: Dialogue

We’re still far away.

SIRI is promising as a moveforward; based on state-of-the-art research.

Trend: Social Search

People are Social; Computers are Lonely.

Don’t Personalize Search, Socialize it!

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Social Search

Implicit: Suggestions generated asa side-effect of search activity.

Asking: Communicatingdirectly with others.

Collaborative: Working withother people on a search task.

Explicit: knowledge accumulating viathe deliberate contributions of many.

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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)

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Social Search: Implicit Suggestions

Human-generated suggestions still beat purelymachine-generated ones

Spelling suggestions

Query term suggestions (“search as you type”)

Recommendations (books, movies, etc)

Ranking (using clickthrough statistics)

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Social Search: Asking for Answers What do people ask of their social networks?

Type % Example

Recommendation 29%Building a new playlist – any ideas for goodrunning songs?

Opinion 22%I am wondering if I should buy the Kitchen-Aidice cream maker?

Factual 17%Anyone know a way to put Excel charts intoLaTeX?

Rhetorical 14% Why are men so stupid?

Invitation 9% Who wants to go to Navya Lounge this evening?

Favor 4% Need a babysitter in a big way tonight…anyone??

Social connection 3%I am hiring in my team. Do you know anyonewho would be interested?

Offer 1% Could any of my friends use boys size 4 jeans?

Morris et al., CHI 2010

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Social Search: Explicit Help viaQuestion-Answering Sites

Content is produced in a manner amenableto searching for answers to questions.

Search tends to work well on these sites andon the internet leading to these sites

Like an FAQ but with many authors, and

with the questions that the audience really wants theanswers to, and

written in the language the audience wants to use.

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Social Search: Seeing what peopleyou know have seen Yahoo MyWeb, Google Social Search

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Social Search: Explicit SuggestionsBuilding 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 2006

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Social Search: People Collaborating

Tools to help with this are only just beginning.

Pickens et al., SIGIR 2008

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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 2006-2009

YouTube: Video “responses” apparently arose spontaneously

Videos for presidential debates were mundane.

Millions of video views; no where near this number for articlereadings

Pew: Marketing emails with podcasts 20% more likely to beopened.

Movies with subtitles do poorly in the U.S.

Newspaper web sites are starting to look like TV.

(Full essay at http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#hearst)

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Future Trend: The Decline of Text and Riseof Audio/Video

Other advantages Doesn’t require literacy (but can serve as a bridge)

Robust video devices to teach agriculturaltechniques

What about the popularity of texting? An interesting counter-trend

Especially popular among youth Cheap

Can be done surreptitiously

(Full essay at http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#hearst)

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Future Trend: The Decline of Text and Riseof 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 http://edge.org/q2009/q09_9.html#hearst)

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Future Trends … not so much?

Personalization

Visualization … some breakthroughs areneeded.

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Summary

As CS gets more sophisticated, we can buildsearch interfaces that allow people tointeract more naturally: More language-like queries

Speaking & hearing rather than typing & reading

More able to interact with other people whiledoing search tasks

More able to use the knowledge in peoples’ heads

Thank you!

Marti HearstUC Berkeley

Book full text freely available at:

http://searchuserinterfaces.com