In his book The Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz says that contrary to conventional wisdom, giving people many choices is often bad for them:
- When presented with many choices, many people experience "choice paralysis" and do nothing, even when doing nothing is the worst possible choice. For example, give people 20 choices of mutual funds in their 401k, and many more will just let their money sit in a low-yield money market fund than if they only had a few choices.
- When people do select from a large field of alternatives, whether for consumer products or life partners, they usually experience greater "buyer's remorse" than those who selected from a small number of alternatives.
One way to solve the paradox, Schwartz argues, is to hire an agent to do the choosing for you, so you don't have to suffer the consequences of choice (choice paralysis or buyer's remorse). So when a real estate agent shows you three homes, or an insurance broker presents a small handful of options, Schwartz says you may not make the perfect selection out of all possibilities, but you're more likely to take *some* action, and to feel better about it later.
Google is an agent for finding information, and the relevance of their results helps hide much of the irrelevant crap that's out there. But according to Schwartz, the sheer volume of results may be leaving searchers with an inability to choose, or bad feelings about their choices. To remedy this Schwartz recommends that Google develop "hierarchical searching" where people can choose from a small set of branches, and narrow down from there what they're looking for -- a series of choices from a small number of alternatives rather than a bewildering set of thousands of results.
Seems like Google's doing this already with some searches, like for jobs, cars, homes, and health.
