In developmental psychology, the transactional relationship between a parent and a child refers to the effects of each of their temperaments on each other. It is particularly interesting to see how those effects shape future interactions and the overall development of the child. A child with a negative temperament may evoke negative responses out of the parent, which may further negatively affect the child, negatively affecting the parent, and so on and so forth.
Similarly, a search engine and its users share a transactional relationship in that the search engine’s results are based on satisfying the majority of users in their search behavior, and the search behaviors of users adapt to the limitations of the search engine. Remember your disappointment when you realized that you really couldn’t ask Jeeves anything you wanted to know? As anyone who has used a search engine knows, you can’t just ask any question in any form and get what you want. The more you use the search engine, the more you understand what kind of questions can be asked and how they ought to be formulated to get optimal results. At some point, you stop attempting questions that you have seen fail in the past--whether the failure was a result of a lack of information, or the question just wasn’t suited for search engines at the time. As users are trained on limitations, the demand for answers to the questions where the search engine is weak diminishes, and so there is a less apparent urgency for the search engine to improve where it is weakest.
This transactional relationship could create blind spots for major search engines and open opportunities for disruptive technologies to come along and change the user’s understanding of the possibilities in search. Somewhere, the desires that users don’t know they have yet are meeting newly charted territory in technological feasibility. That is the sweet spot for any new search enterprise.
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