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No Web technology has undergone such an impressive evolution as Web search engines did and still do. Starting with the promise of "Bringing order to the Web" 1 by compiling information sources matching a query, retrieval technology has been evolving to a kind of "oracle machinery", being able to recommend a single source, and even to provide direct answers extracted from that source. Notwithstanding the remarkable progress made and the apparent user preferences for direct answers, this paradigm shift comes at a price which is higher than one might expect at first sight, affecting both users and search engine developers in their own way. We call this tradeoff "the dilemma of the direct answer"; it deserves an analysis which has to go beyond system-oriented aspects but scrutinize the way our society deals with both their information needs and means to information access. The paper in hand contributes to this analysis by putting the evolution of retrieval technology and the expectations at it in the context of information retrieval history. Moreover, we discuss the trade offs in information behavior and information system design that users and developers may face in the future.
Potthast et al. (Mon,) studied this question.