{"id":5209,"date":"2010-11-01T12:41:21","date_gmt":"2010-11-01T12:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=5209"},"modified":"2010-11-01T12:41:21","modified_gmt":"2010-11-01T12:41:21","slug":"the-anti-search-attitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2010\/11\/01\/the-anti-search-attitude\/","title":{"rendered":"The anti-search attitude"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday I picked up a special one-off Google &#8220;how to&#8221; \u00a39.99 magazine in W.H. Smiths (the biggest UK magazine chain store).  It claimed to be a comprehensive guide to Google, yet devoted just a half of one of its hundreds of pages to some basic search modifiers such as &#8220;quote marks for phrase&#8221;.  And most of that half-page was screenshots. This inexplicable dismissal of search as a teachable skill is something that&#8217;s been worrying me for some time.  Despite the absolute necessity of learning to search, to find and re-find &mdash; it&#8217;s not a skill that&#8217;s taught at primary, secondary or further education, except in the most perfunctory manner.  Students enter my new technologies undergraduate class and the British education system has simply not equipped 95% of them with the most basic knowledge of how to skilfully search using Google.<\/p>\n<p>Stephen E. Arnold of <em>Beyond Search<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/arnoldit.com\/wordpress\/2010\/11\/01\/anti-search-in-2011\/\">has a long post today<\/a> in which he sees this same inexplicable mood appearing in businesses, where bad search skills have a direct financial impact.  He calls the new mood &#8220;anti-search&#8221;&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;People at this meeting don\u2019t want search. These attributes are anti search, and I think that is the big trend for 2011. Everyday users of online systems don\u2019t know how to formulate a query, figure out most business intelligence reports, and have little time to invest in piecing together an \u201canswer.\u201d The goal is the intellectual equivalent of buying a do-nut when hungry. Quick, easy, and probably not good in the long run but okay for the now moment.<\/p>\n<p>What is anti search? <\/p>\n<p>I think it is a culmination of many experiences. People who did lousy research in college don&#8217;t become great researchers when they get a job, gain 30 pounds, and have to juggle life\u2019s rubber balls. <\/p>\n<p>Anti search, therefore, is the need for systems that are easy to use, require little intellectual effort to learn, and deliver \u201cgood enough\u201d information. Maybe information \u201con training wheels\u201d is a better way to think about anti search. <\/p>\n<p>Anti search 2011 is taking root in an environment with several characteristics&#8230;&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is a ridiculous attitude, since properly training staff in search would pay for itself.  For instance, in a recent <em>Network World<\/em> (2010) article on findability, it was said that research has found that professionals&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That\u2019s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And a summary of the Summer 2010 ROI Research survey of 500 search-engine users found that\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;19% abandon the online search, taking it offline if they can\u2019t find the information&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The UK business situation was reported in research from official UK government researchers YouGov, <em>The Costs of Traditional Filing<\/em>. Small and medium businesses in the UK&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;[staff in an average firm] spend approx. 3 months a year looking for [paper] documents [&#8230;] 87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The national waste of time was estimated to cost \u00a342 million each day. And that&#8217;s just paper documents.  Add to that the time that untrained staff waste looking for things <em>online<\/em> (<em>&#8220;spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time&#8221;<\/em>), and it seems there&#8217;s some serious wastage going on in businesses. And I\u2019d suspect that matters are the same in much of the UK&#8217;s public sector.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturday I picked up a special one-off Google &#8220;how to&#8221; \u00a39.99 magazine in W.H. Smiths (the biggest UK magazine &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2010\/11\/01\/the-anti-search-attitude\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-my-general-observations","category-official-and-think-tank-reports","category-spotted-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}