Pele's Blog

Siri --- The Next Generation of Search Engine?

Days ago, Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the board and former CEO of Google, said that siri, released on Apple latest iPhone 4S, is a great development in search area and it will be a main competitor to Google's core search business. This is a very intersting topic. Let us read his words between the lines from a user's point of view. Is Eric Schmidt's words really mean that or not.

One of the basic principle of webpage design is "don't make users think". That is to say a nice design never makes its users think and learn how to use it. That's a kind of waste of time. From my point of view, this principle has general applicability to a certain extent, especially for users. When users get a new product, they need to know how to use it and experience the joyment fast. As a common user, you will not focus on how many new tech used on this new product in most cases. Instead, you want to know what can this product do, how well will it work and how about its user experience. A nice product always does a better job than its competitors on the ease of use. The reason why Apple's products are popular is not only their industrail design but also their nice user experience. The nice user experience includes incridible ease to use and smooth human-device interaction.

Take one of my own experience as an example, when I am filling some forms and I use google to search Hong Kong's post-code more than once then I need to choose one of the ten results from the first page of google search results and after I click one of the results I can finally get what I need, the Hong Kong's post-code. Let's think, if I use siri, it's much more easier than that. I just need to ask "What's the post-code of Hong Kong?" to her, I will get my answer fast and I even do not need to see it, siri will talk to me and tell me the post-code of Hong Kong. For users, they all lazy. Talking about the iPhone 4s, it is a nice smart phone from Apple. iPhone to Mac can help you to backup your iPhone 4s files on your Mac. For windows users, please use iPhone to PC transfer. No matter search engine(Google) or Siri, they are just a kind of solution, a way to meet their needs. They care about the result is accurate or not and the response is fast or slow. When both of the two ways can help users to solve their problems, as a user, they will prefer the easy, quick and better user experience one. Of course, siri and other voice search products that may be appear later have a long way to go. At least, now siri only support few languages. I think that Siri's popular proves that voice search will be the king in search area. People are lazy and they need more easier to use product. At the same time, I believe that a voice search product that can be used in multi-platform will be much more popular thant siri, which can only be used on iOS platform.