Why is this disruption leading me to focus on industry work? The dominance of a single search producer has limited creativity and access to knowledge. A persistent monopoly on web search and our conceptions of search has greatly limited the human experience. We must do better. This nascent, and only potential, disruption, while presenting various harms and risks, is an opportunity to build alternative tools and practices that have the potential to lead to a flourishing of knowledge sharing and creativity. I do not think “generative search” as currently provided or practiced is an unalloyed good nor our goal, but it has helped many recognize that search could be different, better. My research, experience, and skills are highly relevant to imagining and developing alternatives while deeply in conversation with users. So I am looking to find or create an opportunity in industry for me to work on repairing search.
In this I work in a “desire-based framework” (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Here is the final paragraph of my dissertation (Griffin, 2022, p. 126):
We can find ways to clearly legitimate effective web search practices, celebrating searchers rather than stigmatizing them. We can learn to distinguish effective search practices from those that are manipulated or poorly modeled and likely to misinform or fail to inform. While we must seek knowledge of the mechanisms of web search engines in order to reshape or replace them, we can find places to search around the opacity. We could share habits and practices that are not constrained by lack of transparency on the part of the decisions of commercial web search engine companies or inherent in the systems they build. We can focus on building the knowledge for effective searching into our practices, tools, and environments. We can work on mobilizing and recognizing effective search seeds in different domains. We could focus on developing and calibrating our individual and collective ability to evaluate search results and our results-of-search. We can look for configurations of components that let us decouple from search automation bias. We might see more of our interactions as spaces where we participate in formulating and evaluating searches with others. We can spread the practices for search repair that connect and encourage people rather than cut them apart and tear them down. We can see the extensions of search and find or fashion our own techniques to scaffold our searching and refashion our search practices. We can address search gaps in ways apart from turning to automation. We can determine how to share our search activities in ways that are appropriately sensitive to the relations between people and their goals in different contexts. We can make the extensions and effects of search more visible. We can make talking about search less shameful. We can find more ways to search together. We can recognize how search is a shared performance and can be a shared responsibility.
Griffin, D. (2022). Situating web searching in data engineering: Admissions, extensions, repairs, and ownership [PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley]. https://danielsgriffin.com/assets/griffin2022situating.pdf [griffin2022situating]
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). R-words: Refusing research. In Humanizing research: Decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities (pp. 223–248). SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12 [tuck2014r]
Image generation and generative search? Presque vu. Etc. Scaffolding alternative search engines.
Is [Is [this] recyclable?] one way image search can be more than a party trick? See, ex.: [can you recycle this image recognition]. (Acknowledging possible disinformation efforts…)