Have you ever been out with a group of friends discussing a particular subject matter and then called someone who was not present in order to retrieve some bit of trivia? I don’t have a cell phone anymore, but I see people do this all the time.

I like it because it’s a totally natural use of human intelligence. Certain people are experts with certain types of information and systems of thinking.

Same thing happens with search engines: some people just have a facility with formulating query strings and finding relevant results that others do not have. Actually, the fact that two different people can search for the same information on Google and come up with totally different answers depending on how they conduct that search seems like quite a challenging thing. If a search engine is designed to return the most relevant results, shouldn’t it return the most relevant results whether or not the person utilizing it is an expert in its use? The simple fact that it does not is proof to me that humans are still a whole hell of a lot better at finding information than search engines. (Not that search engines are obsolete - hardly! I just think they could stand to be improved by leaps and bounds…)

As such, I have personally begun to rely less and less on search algorithms to find information and more on “human search agents.” I find them to be more reliable and more entertaining in the long run. This is a trend that I predict will actually increase a lot over time, as well. Take a look first of all at those “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” shows. They don’t give you the option of using a search engine to find the answer to a particular bit of trivia. Rather, they use various means of elimination, statistical analysis of audience opinion, and human search agents {see also: performance librarians}, “phone a friend.”

Here’s a relevant free ad for Google, chosen by me a human and not an ad-serving algorithm:

You also see the human search agent trend carried through with things like “Google Answers” - and I think Yahoo has similar: services where you pose a question onto a forum and pay some small amount of money for the answer. Usually they are questions which are more elaborate than a search algorithm can currently answer. Something like, “How do I form an LLC in the state of Maryland?” or “Why do Catholics believe in Transubstantiation and what is considered Biblical proof for that belief?”

Depending on how you phrase complex questions like that, you may be able to just Google it and find a half dozen pages with relevant information which you can skim through and find approximate answers to your questions. But really, you shouldn’t have to go through all that bullshit. We *should* be able to build algorithms which can skim and digest information for you and deliver it in a quick human-readable format. And yet we don’t. The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, actually. And when you get down to it, the information it returns is often a hell of a lot more valuable for a preliminary search than Google’s results. And Wikipedia is written and maintained by humans. Go figure!