Search as a Conversation

A lot of times people don't think very precisely, right? They think in ambiguous terms, and they'll want very precise results.

The problem is, how do we take that ambiguous thinking and give people precise results? We do this by actually having a conversation with them. I like to say search is a conversation.

If you ask me a question and I don't understand it or you're being very vague, I'll ask you for clarification. If you ask me, "Seth, can you give me some examples of deliverables?" I'll say, "Well, what kind of deliverables do you want?" And you can say, well, I really want something for this type of project, or for that type of industry, or whatever it might be.

We can do this sort of thing with search on a website, because if asked an ambiguous question, we can return back a set of results that actually takes people through the taxonomy and lets them very precisely say, "This is what I specifically want."

I'll give you an example. Motorola: on the Motorola website, if you put in the term "mobile," it's a very ambiguous term because everything is mobile on the Motorola website. So you can disambiguate by saying, well, what kind of thing do you want? Are you looking for mobile phones, are you looking for mobile tower equipment, are you looking for mobile security systems? There's a whole bunch of different things in the Motorola website that do that.

And so this idea of increasing the precision of the recall is very, very important.