“Marcia Bates” is a name I’ve seen many times in my LIBR 202 course. Her paper on “berrypicking” techniques for online search interfaces is a particular favorite of mine in no small part because of the remarkable analogy she draws. But I imagine a at least a few of her fellow library science students got a little tired of hearing the name “Marcia” all the time.

As the title suggests, Bates’ primary focus in this paper is on the design of online search interfaces for what she calls “the evolving search” in which “the query itself (as well as the search terms used) is continually shifting, in part or whole.” For Bates, this model is “much closer to the real behavior of information searchers than the traditional model of information retrieval.” In fact, Bates seeks to “challenge the [traditional] model as a whole” because she believes that “it represents some searches, but not all, perhaps not even the majority, and that with respect to those it does represent, if frequently does so inadequately. Her opinion seems to be that the “classic” model of information retrieval is a “productive” but antiquated ideal that should be modernized and mechanized to support the “real behavior of information searchers,” and she argues that “typical search queries are not static, but rather evolve.”

For me, the connection between berrypicking and evolutionary search evokes a vivid mental image of how much has changed since the days of hunting and gathering societies, and how dependent we’ve become on the search engines and electronic information for our daily sustenance.This notion of an “evolving search” immediately reminded me of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The theory that Bates put forth also reminded me of the philosopher Karl Popper and his evolutionary theory of knowledge, and I thought it might be interesting to critique berrypicking as “evolutionary theory” of information retrieval.

Popper put forth a theory of knowledge that was “coterminus” to Darwin’s theory of evolution, a state of ever-changing nature in which problem-solving was tantamount to survival. Popper believed that knowledge is “an adaptation to a partly unknown environment” that is the result of “anticipatory trials and of unavoidable errors, and of error elimination”. Popper’s conclusion from this is that “knowledge has often the character of expectation” that that “expectations…are uncertain.”

Here we see a major distinction in the way Bates and Popper approach the subject of evolution. While Bates appears to approach information retrieval as an additive, inductive process in which searchers successfully accumulate data bit by bit, Popper views the acquisition of knowledge as a deductive process of trial and error.

Returning to the analogy of berrypicking and the evolving search, Popper might point out that picking berries, like seeking information, is a process of adaptation based on trial (reaching for berry) and error (pricking finger on thorn). Popper might also have argued that search interfaces should be designed to accommodate this problem-solving process by facilitating error elimination. And indeed, we see this type of deductive approach at work through methods such as disambiguation.

Information retrieval is never painless or easy

Information retrieval is never painless or easy

This is not necessarily a refutation of Bates or her observation that information retrieval is myopically obsessed with subject description. The point here is that there may be an opportunity to take a deductive, rather than inductive, approach to Bates’ theory of berrypicking in hopes of better understanding what triggers change in the evolving search and why information seekers switch between various strategies and information sources over the course of a macro-search query.