A searcher moves through scattered sources, collecting one useful piece at each stop.In 1989 Marcia Bates showed that people search by gathering, shifting, and revising as they go. Her ideas explain what AI still misses and what is still relevant from research done 47 years ago.Much of what product teams are learning about artificial intelligence search, an information scientist wrote down before the web existed. Marcia J. Bates spent her career at UCLA studying how people search and her 1989 paper, The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface, argued that real searches wander, change shape, and collect value in pieces.She aimed it at library databases that assumed one query and one best result; AI turns this on its head.The chat box makes the same assumption, only faster.Bates is still relevant in the age of artificial intelligence, arguably more...