Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web by Daniel E. Rose/ Reviewed by J. Colannino

For a fellow who is an expert in search engines, Daniel E. Rose’s biography isn’t very findable on the web. At least not if you search with Yahoo, Alta Vista, or Google. This is interesting, because he has worked for two of the three firms and his stated expertise is to improve search results for users. Maybe his biography is buried somewhere in the 740 Google returns for “Daniel E. Rose,” or one of the 297 returns for Yahoo, or somewhere on Alta Vista. But of course, being an expert on search behavior he should know that no one really looks past the first page of returns. It didn’t matter whether I qualified his name with “biography” or “curricula vitae,” I just couldn’t find his bio, even on Wikipedia. He is referenced multiple times in a book about natural language processing, but its text was not searchable within Amazon.com’s search-inside-the-book tool. Google Book Search did allow for searching, but there he was listed in references only. However, that did lead me to a book that he did author: A Symbolic and Connectionist. But I could find nothing indexed regarding a biography or an “about the author” section.

Here is what I was able to glean about his career: according to this reference he worked for Apple. UC Berkeley listed him as Dr. Daniel E. Rose and gives video of one of his presentations here. The subject article lists him as working for Alta Vista. I found both the video presentation and this subject article a bit too commercial for my tastes; it looks more like a commercial for Alta Vista’s Prisma search engine then anything else. However, maybe there is something to Prisma, because using it was the only time I actually found something of a biography for Dr. Rose. It was for the Ordinology Consulting Group where he is a principal, and you can see his C.V. here. At this point I wanted to play the Hallelujah Chorus by Handel. Unfortunately, Prisma only gave me access to paid downloads. However, Google linked me to a free sample clip. If you click the link you can find it in an alphabetized list under “HANDEL ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Messiah” where you can download the MP3. It would be nice to play right now and to loop continuously as you read on.

Go ahead… I’ll give you a moment.

I think all of these user-interface guys have it wrong. We need systems that will accommodate us not only when we are in our initial “webtarded” stage, but also after we become proficient. That means two interfaces – the cryptic command line Boolean string stuff for experts and the pretty picture point and click interface. Why can’t we have both? There is a paper I wrote that discusses this. It concerned computer operating systems specifically, but I think that a variant has relevance for search engines as well. You can find it here. Then you can tell me what you think about my idea.

Okay, you should probably shut-off the Hallelujah Chorus now.