On Thumbnail Preview

When Ask.com first came out with their thumbnail preview of the page in, I was a bit upset. It goes a long way toward providing the type of extra information that I see being useful in genre classification, namely: "What type of page is this?". Since using it a bit more, I have become both more worried and more reassured.

More worried because (at the risk of sounding like a promoter) the feature is incredibly useful. By mousing over the links I can very quickly weed out spam-like sites that I'm not really interested in and get to the more appropriate ones that I need. Search UI assistance is particularly useful in dealing with broad queries, people who don't know how to form queries, and one word queries. In all of these cases, the results will be quite varied and manual filtering is required. By putting a thumbnail preview on the page, I take out a step for all of those query types. I don't have to page back and forth through results, looking for the one nugget of goodness.


However, I'm reassured because people are lazy and the process isn't perfect. First of all, sometimes the information is not there or is old or couldn't be rendered correctly for the preview. However, any classification system would suffer from similar issues, so I'll not fault them there. The fundamental problem is that the searcher still has to do the work. The positive aspect of this is that in general humans are smarter than machines. On the otherhand, they still have to go through the same process, it's just faster. In essence, the tool isn't really helping anyone find information, it's just making the task quicker.

Other aspects of Ask.com and Google do make my life easier. When they detect that I'm searching for a city and give me weather and maps and all sorts of neat things, that's taking a good guess at what I want to know. I think that genre classification falls more into this type of category. And that is what strengthens my resolve as I progress my research in that area.