Here's a reply - forwarded with permission (from my wife).
To respond myself - my initial email may have muddled the fact that I'm not
so much interested in what kinds of responsibilities these businesses have,
or whether we should trust them or not, than with what these systems (and
their limited, commercial, purpose) tell us, by contrast, about how systems
employed by libraries (or, possibly, by true database/content vendors like
Lexis or Westlaw) work, and also with what a *librarian's*
collaborative-filtering and/or query-suggesting system might look like.
For better or worse, and regardless of the fact that it is outside of the
strict intentions of these commercial entities, our *patrons* do indeed use
these systems/websites (Amazon, in particular) as a means of conducting
research and these types of systems are shaping what is expected of us.
...here come the 'out of office' emails...
Two thoughts:
1) Amazon has little or responsibility to be transparent unless its
customers want that; its primary responsibility is to make money by
meeting its customers' needs.
2) The Wal-Mart/Amazon problem is not a filtering problem at all; it's
a UI problem.
> This points to a situation in which commercial entities (who often
actually
> strive to mask the very mechanism of how their systems "magically"
identify
> related searches) are in a bit of a quandary when the objective
application
> of software algorithms to offer up "related" searches provides results
that
> might offend some number of customers. There is a related anecdote about
a
> Wal-Mart collaborative-filtering system ("people who watched/enjoyed
movie
> X also watched/enjoyed movie Y") that ran into similar problems.
The "social" user interface raises user expectations of appropriate
behavior from a machine; by toning down the "gosh shucks, I'm just
like a person" tone of the copy (from "did you mean" to "you might be
interested in..." or "people who liked X also liked Y") Amazon or
Wal-Mart can avoid the negative user experience associated with nuance
falling flat.
What's the quandary? If Amazon has any responsibilty to effect
transparency by producing consistent results, that responsibility is
trumped by their need to respond to customer desires, and customers
(at least some loud ones) don't want to feel like their bookstore is
second-guessing their reproductive choices. Amazon.com is, as far as
they can see, being extremely rude.
> It seems like these systems could create delicate PR situations for
> management whether they work "right" or whether they work "wrong" from a
> pure information-retrieval, relevance, perspective.
For all practical purposes, nobody cares how they work, as long as
they do work (where work = produce usable results without being
insulting.)
The problem is not the offering of other options, but the phrase "did
you mean...?" There's a big difference between "did you mean
adoption?" and "would you like to search for adoption" or "do you want
books on adoption?" The first sounds snarky and reproving. From a user
behavior standpoint, it's a legitimate question, but it's socially
unacceptable.
The issue is similar with Walmart; searching for Roots and getting a
suggestion for Planet of the Apes isn't always going to be offensive,
but a UI that implies a subject link between the two is.
What say you?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:46:24 PST