Just a quick one on search

I was reading this article and I have to say my first reaction was why can't you just ask the user. Of course few paragraphs later, there was the line indicating they use trained individual who evaluate the results returned.

But how can you train someone to think like me and look for the things I am looking for? Of course I am not that special and probably fall right in the middle of the bell curve of regular person. But I'd still like to think I am not exactly learning what everyone else is, or even not learning it the same way everyone else is.

One easy way would be to check which position within the results I selected to look at and which ones I actually reported as being relevant to my search. This could be implemented already without much changes to the current Google results, then again maybe they are already doing that, well the first part anyway.
Is there a way for me to disqualify pages/sites from search results already?  From this question comes the obvious next point. It would be nice to be able to exclude the places I have already been to. Or maybe not put them on top of my search results. Been there, done that type of approach, probably don’t want to do it again for a while. It is a bit counter productive for me to have to scroll through all those places I have already been to. We could at least flag those pages as recently visited, that would help me with the issue of, I think I have already read this, why could I not remember this based on the obscure hyperlink I clicked on.

As soon as I started thinking about how to collect what I think relevant is, I quickly started wondering about what relevant really means. What is a relevant result? Is it something that gives me exactly the information I was looking for or is it something that also gives me the ability to find something I did not think about but opens my understanding of the searched topic? Every time my mind wonders in that direction, I think about ‘people who bought this book also bought…’. Which of course is not as relevant as people who loved this book also read those ones when looking for a similar topic.

The other thought that came to my mind was, when I am googling, I am trying to learn about something 80% of the time and then I am probably trying to entertain myself. Can the search engine differentiate between one mode and the other? Should I be fed similar results depending on that search mode? Personally I am more interested in hard core articles (with lots of texts) full of information when learning and I need lots of images and moving pictures when entertaining myself.  You can tell I just like text by looking at this blog, I might need to add more picture if I ever want someone else to look at it and get something out of it. I almost want different modes, the casual lots of pictures showing in the results mode and the hard core facts one. And I should be able to choose every time based on the type of search I am currently conducting.Then again, not everyone learns the same way, it is a bit of a conundrum. Some people like to learn by looking at pictures. Is there ever the hope a search engine could understand the difference?
Here comes the basic point again: it will never happen unless we collect information from the user and usage of the system. And of course, I would not agree to it unless I could review the information collected. I would even go as far as saying I would turn the collection off is there is no way for me to be able to control the information itself. Anyway, I have some crazy probably never going to happen kind of ideas about what searching should really be. It cannot remain a cookie cutter approach for much longer, it will need to include personalization and preferences. It is only a matter of time.