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ACM CHI: more search could be crowdsourced

07.05.2012
Search engines could use crowdsourcing to expand the range of answers they give to their users, a group of researchers from the Microsoft and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have concluded.

Today, Web search engines primarily use computer-run page ranking algorithms to generate results for user submitted queries. For a small number of simple queries however, services return the exact answer the user is seeking. Google, for instance, could return a the local show times for a movie, the weather for a certain region, or the results of a simple math problem.

This range of answers could be radically expanded through some data mining techniques and crowdsourced editing, according to M.I.T. researcher Michael Bernstein, who summarized the group's work at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, being held this week in Austin, Texas.

In a trial survey with 361 participants, the researchers found that search engines, by providing more direct answers to queries, could significantly improve their users' perceptions of search quality, especially for those queries that did not return many relevant pages. "Our findings suggest that search engines can be extended to directly respond to a large new class of queries," stated the paper describing the work, entitled "Direct Answers for Search Queries in the Long Tail.".

The range of answers search engines could provide could be radically expanded with a relative minimal additional cost, the researchers argued. The key would be to harness the power of crowdsourcing, or contracting people to identify the answers to simple but frequently asked questions.

Today, search engines will only provide direct answers to a small subset of queries, namely those that get asked often. In these cases, the search engine provides the actual answer to the question, rather than just a link to where the answer could be found. With such popular questions, search engine companies find it worthwhile to devote engineers to manually craft program code to identify each question, and then find and supply the answers. "These kinds of answers are only available to popular queries, because search engines have to put a lot of effort into them," Bernstein said.