This paper explores a simple question: How would we provide a high-quality search experience on Mars, where the fundamental physical limit is speed-of-light propagation delays on the order of tens of minutes? On Earth, users are accustomed to nearly instantaneous response times from search engines. Is it possible to overcome orders-of-magnitude longer latency to provide a tolerable user experience on Mars? In this paper, we formulate the searching from Mars problem as a tradeoff between "effort" (waiting for responses from Earth) and "data transfer" (pre-fetching or caching data on Mars). The contribution of our work is articulating this design space and presenting two case studies that explore the effectiveness of baseline techniques, using publicly available data from the TREC Total Recall and Sessions Tracks. We intend for this research problem to be aspirational and inspirational - even if one is not convinced by the premise of Mars colonization, there are Earth-based scenarios such as searching from a rural village in India that share similar constraints, thus making the problem worthy of exploration and attention from researchers.
The problem of searching from Mars is intended to be aspirational as well as inspirational. Even if one remains unconvinced about interplanetary colonization in the short term, our work remains relevant in the same sense that zombie apocalypse preparations advocated by the Centers for Disease Control are instructive. http: www.cdc.gov phpr zombies.htm Like that effort, theoretical considerations about unlikely scenarios can lead to insights with more immediate impact. In fact, search from Mars can be thought of as a specific instantiation of what @cite_13 call slow search'', which aims to relax latency requirements for a potentially higher-quality search experience. Slow search explores latencies on the order of minutes to hours, which is similar to speed of light propagation delay to Mars. There is substantial precedent for our work, as we discuss below.
@cite_13
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Significant time and effort has been devoted to reducing the time between query receipt and search engine response, and for good reason. Research suggests that even slightly higher retrieval latency by Web search engines can lead to dramatic decreases in users' perceptions of result quality and engagement with the search results. While users have come to expect rapid responses from search engines, recent advances in our understanding of how people find information suggest that there are scenarios where a search engine could take significantly longer than a fraction of a second to return relevant content. This raises the important question: What would search look like if search engines were not constrained by existing expectations for speed? In this paper, we explore slow search, a class of search where traditional speed requirements are relaxed in favor of a high quality search experience. Via large-scale log analysis and user surveys, we examine how individuals value time when searching. We confirm that speed is important, but also show that there are many search situations where result quality is more important. This highlights intriguing opportunities for search systems to support new search experiences with high quality result content that takes time to identify. Slow search has the potential to change the search experience as we know it.