While I agree with that statement I take a different conceptual idea of what google is.

If a system had 10 pages would you build search functionality to aid the user’s navigation? Scale up to 100, I would focus effort on high level menus and search. Up again to Amazon, there’s a menu but the site is so large most people just use the search. Now scale up to the internet ‘system’. Is there any point trying to build a tradional menu for the internet?

Google is a pure search/navigation interface to the internet. Thats a fairly obvious statement, but think of it from a user interface perspective. They’re ‘start’ button for the net with recomendation functionality that dynamically builds a menu list to information available on the system based on your search criterea.

If users of google dont perceive it to be a recommendation engine, then its results arent diegested as recommendations. People arent feeling all that ‘inukshuk’ goodness. Perception is 9/10ths of the law in UI world. (I just made that up but it sounds good, from ‘possesion is 9/10th..)

When you think of google as the user interface to the internet you see why they avoid being a portal, why http://www.google.com is simple and an insight in to the thinking behind a lot of their ui design decisions. Could you infer this from the Googlemendations standpoint?

I like the idea that Google is the search/navigation interface to the internet. But in context, the pulled quote is all about why Google as a search engine succeeded over Yahoo!. The paragraph before that one reads:

“You see, Yahoo! was building an internet directory/search engine where everything was categorized by hand. It’s easy to see now that this is a near-impossible feat with the millions of new pages that pop up daily. What Google figured out is that using the hyperlink as a kind of vote of attention, you could start to organize the world’s information. Essentially what Google did was seize the opportunity to build a smarter search engine by enlisting the attention data of web-users in the form of hyperlinks.”

Just thought I’d try to clear that up.

Noah, you’re right and its an interesting point well made. I was just giving a alternate view that recomendations are a part of the google way. For example (and I’m not saying you said this) but if google was just a ‘giant recommendation engine’ then there would be fluff all over http://www.google.com

As it is they dont even have their ‘recommended’ ads up there.

From your post I would say that Yahoo tried to build the ‘internet menu’ by hand, allowing users to search their menu. Google used a system that could be viewed as recommendations to push more popular items to the forefront of the menu.

However, personally I consider a recommendation system to be something with an element of what UIE call Inukshuk. Otherwise you have something like Walmart ‘recommending’ Planet of the Apes to buyers of a Martin Luther King video.
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/06_01/walmart-recommender.html

Automated recommendation systems, google search included as perceived automated, will(?) never have the trust of users. So my question then is, leading on from your post, should pagerank be called a recommendation system if users dont think of it as such?

Or does it really matter?

Interesting stuff, before answering I’ve got a counter-question:

Why will automated recommendation systems never have the trust of users?

I’d love to continue this conversation, if you want to do it via email drop me a line.

Sorry, I’ll qualify that. Automated systems will never have the -complete- trust of users. This may be a personal belief but I feel its a fairly good generalisation. Humans dont trust machines. From worrying about the automatic cat feeder when on holiday, to the failure of automatic spam filtering to catch everything. No one in their right mind ‘trusts’ a computer.

And specific to Recommendations. If a user were to trust the recommended results 100% then that user accepts the machine knows best. Why isnt everyone using ‘Im feeling lucky’? Users have genuine questions about the quality of the recommendation, who has had a vested interest in the results you’ve received. And quite frankly, a lot of automatic systems suck, pulling down the value of the better ones.

We can take this in to email but I feel its still within topic and of value to Bokardo. Let me know – pauric

I do think that users will learn to completely trust recommendation systems. Josh pointed to the fact that 2/3 of all Netflix rentals come from recommendations just a few weeks ago. As for the “I’m Feeling Lucky,” I actually think that’s a case of bad copywriting. If people understood that when you clicked that it took you to your top result for your search term it might get a lot more play. I for one use it all the time, as Firefox has built it into the address field (something I discovered a while ago).

Anyway, the beauty of recommendation systems is that it’s just that: a recommendation. It’s not a final decision, it’s a suggestion of something you might be interested in. The thing is, the better the recommendations become, the more trust the user places in the results.

no, I have to disagree but I accept some people may trust automatrons 100%. My take is that if a person completely trusts an automated system to fully understand their potential desires then that person has reached the following conclusions
a)A machine understand my needs as well as I do.
b)The machine is as smart as any person I trust to give me recommendations.

This is not to say fully automated recommendation systems will not become more clever, and I do use some of the smarter ones but I think this is a different topic on personal v. cold recommendations.

So, question. Do you go straight from netflix recommendation to queue or will you google the film to get a second opinion?

If you’ve ever done the latter then you dont -trust- the recommendation. I would go as far to say if you trusted their recommendations 100% you would just have them automatically added to your queue and never log in to Netflix, right?