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On Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Nate Hill wrote: > I keep on thinking about how infrequently I use search to surface the media > that I want. > > If this includes Google, I would say you are in the solid minority with this approach to discovery. > > I mean, if I was doing serious research yeah I'd search and drill way past > 2.5 pages of results, I'd look at facets, I'd go bananas getting to the > stuff I need to get to. > > I guess I'm skeptical about this pages and pages of results for stuff that people are "researching". Going back to Google (where searches frequently result in thousands of pages of results), I'm really only overwhelmed with the signal to noise ratio when I'm trying to search for a very specific problem that has very common terms. Like "Airplay icon not appearing". > > But increasingly I deal with interfaces that treat search as a secondary > feature, with predictive or popular results being visually pushed to the > 'home page'. > > Think about your Apple TV, for example. This is actually a feature I never use on my Apple TV. Analogous would be Amazon's homepage (I can't say I've ever serendipitously bought something 'recommended' for me on the homepage, although I have bought recommended things after search) or Netflix. I do sometimes use Netflix's suggestions to help jog my memory of stuff to search for, however. I think, at the end of the day, discovery is hard and is VERY specific to the task, collection and individual (all three of which are variables) and shouldn't be limited to a particular approach. -Ross.