As for Google’s insistence that simplicity trumps power in the interface, no one in the audience brought it up, but I’ve heard it from Googlers before and I alluded to it myself in the talk. And I tried to answer it as follows: make the complexity of the interaction a function of your confidence in system’s understanding of the user’s information need. It’s what we do as human beings.

But they’re still only baby steps. And there is so much more that both could and should be done.

So I know Google famously states how clean and simple they like to keep their interface — almost to the point of obsession. What it appears from the outside is that Google thinks that clean interfaces are more important than interactive interfaces. This is judging purely from their public statements and, well, the interface itself.

What I was curious about gleaning from Daniel is whether, once he actually got there and talked with people, he also found that to be true. Were there any people in the audience, for example, who raised their hands and said anything to the effect of, “yes, it would be nice to consider other aspects of relevance, to consider faceted retrieval, to consider exploratory retrieval, to consider broader HCI-IR communication paradigms. But in order to implement anything that goes beyond a 2-word text input line, that would involve “cluttering” our interface. So we won’t do it.

I’m curious about whether this issue was ever raised.

And even if it wasn’t, I’m curious from Daniel about what his reaction would have been, anyway. What would you have said, Daniel, if someone had said that a clean interface is more important than an interactive interface? And no fair saying that you’d design a “clean, interactive” interface. You’ve watched Google over the past decade+. There really is not much that they will let be added, at all. So how do you overcome that?

Live Image search is really interesting, aside from having the type of image thing like Google just put in, they have a scratch pad to keep pictures they are interested in. you played with it?

The audience certainly wasn’t dismissive, and I think they were quite interested. They seemed to understand me, but I didn’t quiz them afterward. Not even on the partially-ordered set question.

Also, I found out that their VP of Research was in the audience.

Unfortunately, there seem to be some quirks in the embedded presentation. I’ve fixed the quirks on SlideShare, but they don’t seem to be working in the embedded presentation. So I’ve removed the embed and urge you all to view the presentation on SlideShare. My apologies for the inconvenience.