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A step further away from knowing
It’s a common complaint that Google search’s AI perspectives disintermediates or gets in the way between the searcher and artefacts containing the knowledge they seek.
In the naughties, I worked on two projects attempting to create a collective knowledge base for the organisation for which I worked, Sun Professional Services. At the time I wrote up some of the research I did which involved looking at the statistics of tagging, the use of the semweb and the capture of the social graph.
The conclusions we came to was that knowledge management systems were best used to discover experts not the artefacts, which for the organisation I was working, meant the documentation for the deliverables which were primarily system configurations. For each project there was usually sufficient difference for at least some changes to be made from predecessor projects, so they needed to be tuned, and the best way to deal with that was to talk to the authors.
But today google’s AI perspectives and its competitor chatbots disintermediate one even from the artefacts. Perhaps it’s another reason to move to Brave, Vivaldi or Qwant.
Although every search engine is denied the knowledge behind academic publishing’s paywalls!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
