MAS 837
Web Searching Assignment

Vanessa Stevens

Searcher:

It was marginally helpful to have the assistant.  It suggested a few new
search strategies, and provided enjoyable banter when we could not locate
useful web sites.  This was helpful as it kept me on task when I might
have been tempted to give up, but for the most part, I did not feel that it
was significantly better to work with the assistant.  It is difficult for
me to envision an assistant that works with me in a seamless enough way to
make it significantly more productive.  In fact, that's the way I feel
about many programs -- I
would rather make my own accounting program in Excel than deal with setting
up specific features to "customize" a somewhat "smarter" program like
Quicken, as the latter never quite delivers enough smartness to justify the
investment.

=46or the kind of searching we did in this collaboration (hunting for a
specific answer rather than
exploring a topic of interest or browsing for information) it is hard to
imagine that knowing something more about my personal tastes would have
improved the assistant.  This kind of assistant would be more useful if I
could just give it a specific query and it would subsequently return the
answer with its source.  For browsing in my topic area, I would rather have
an assistant that suggested sites, or took my directives, and then visited
those sites on a regular basis (something I never have time to do even when
I have found interesting sites), reporting to me on any updates.

I don't know that I would want a human assistant mediated by the computer,
unless that meant a dedicated virtual librarian who could perform
intelligent searches for me. And that seems somewhat beyond the budget
allocated for graduate student resources.  Up to this point, I have not
seen a program that will provide enough added intelligence to make a
qualitative difference in my own acquisition of materials.


vanessa@media.mit.edu
Epistemology and Learning
MIT Media Lab
http://www.media.mit.edu/~vanessa