|
|
“The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine” is the title of a new Wired article. In it, Robert Capps makes the following point:
The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they’re actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as “high-quality.” And it’s happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip [video camera]. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit.
Capps goes on to make his point using a number of examples: The Flip video camera (easy). Web apps (no installation). Mp3s (small file size). Even healthcare. Quality, he says, is no longer measured by fidelity and richness of experience. It is measured by convenience.
I suppose I cannot argue with empiricism. What is is what is, and the article as a whole seems fairly descriptively accurate. But let me wax normative for a moment. Continue reading…
If it wasn’t official before, it is now. Google self-advertises:
In the latest shot fired in Google Inc.’s ongoing battle with Microsoft Corp., Google announced today that it’s taking this fight to the streets.
Literally.
Google is kicking off a month-long ad campaign for its online suite of enterprise office applications. The campaign will have the search giant leasing billboard space in four major U.S. cities — New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Each work day will have a different message for commuters to take in.
Each day there will be a different message. Each day! This is no small self-advertising undertaking.
Does anyone remember when the lack of self-advertisement was one of the primary points of pride for the company? We’re not talking 10 years ago. Even as recently as SIGIR 2008, Kai Fu Lee stated in front of an audience of 500+ people that Google categorically does not self-advertise. Just a few months before that, Google’s VP of Marketing was interviewed by Business Week: Continue reading…
I have been quiet lately on the blogpost front. Am still looking for a free moment to write up my reactions to the recent SIGIR 2009 conference. In the meantime, I am having a good time with Neal Richter and Daniel Tunkelang, discussing the topic of Search and Advertising. Please come join in the [...]
A number of people have already written about the Sue Dumais “Salton Award” talk at SIGIR. I encourage you to read their posts, and in particular pay attention to the emphasis that she put on her work at the intersection of HCI and IR. I see this area as only continuing to grow over [...]
I just finished reading a though provoking post from Anil Dash, about how Google’s recent Chrome OS announcement signifies an important moment:
This is, for lack of a better term, Google’s “Microsoft Moment”. This is the point when the difference between their internal conception of the company starts to diverge just a bit too far from the public perception of the company, and even starts to diverge from reality. At this inflection point, the reasons for doing new things at Google start to change.
Dash gives a number of explanations for why he believes this moment has arrived. The first observation that struck me was about Google’s attitude toward self-promotion. For its entire company history, Google has proudly and vocally called attention to the fact that it does not advertise its own services; its products speak for themselves and are spread by word-of-mouth and by reputation alone. That is the self-declared “Googly” way. This was not just early days rhetoric, spoken only when the company was young. As recently as last year’s SIGIR 2008 conference in Singapore, Googler Kai Fu Lee explicitly stated during his keynote speech the fact that Google does not self-advertise. But this, Dash says, is changing. Now there are slick television ads for Chrome. There are highly promoted developer conferences for Android. And just two days before Kai Fu Lee gave his SIGIR talk, categorically declaring that Google never self-advertises, I was at a San Francisco Giants game and saw a large, LED banner advertisement for Google Transit. This change has an effect on the public perception of the company. Dash writes:
This would be okay, except that I doubt Google’s internal self-image as an organization has changed to reflect this new reality. “We’re not like some giant company with flashy TV ads — we’re just a bunch of geeks in Mountain View!” And while that might be true for the vast number of engineers who define the company’s internal culture, the external impression of Google being just another tech titan like Microsoft will gain footing, making the audience for Google’s messages less tolerant of ambiguity and less forgiving of mistakes…Google has made commendable steps towards communicating with those outside of its sphere of influence in the tech world. But the messages will be incomplete or insufficient as long as Google doesn’t truly internalize and accept that its public perception is about to change radically. The era of Google as a trusted, “non-evil” startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over.
Now, you might ask: What does all this have to do with this Information Retrieval blog? Continue reading…
I came across an interesting article today in the New Scientist on the topic of mass-scale food annotation. The idea is that we can instrument our food, so that we know much more about its origin and manner of production:
WHERE does your food come from? A few years ago, most consumers were satisfied with a sticker showing the country of origin. But concerns about fair trade and the environment, as well as food safety, are now driving a wave of projects aimed at tracking food from farm to shopping basket. Though price is still the main factor determining the food that people buy, many are demanding to know more about its source. This is partly due to a series of recent food safety scandals, from major outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli to melamine showing up in baby formula and pet food. “The public want to know where their food and other products come from, how they are made, and whether they contain any ‘unhealthful’ contaminants,” says Dara O’Rourke, an environmental policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. Ethical and environmental concerns figure prominently, too. In the US, for example, “a small but rapidly growing percentage of the population – perhaps 8 to 10 per cent – are deeply interested in these issues,” says food policy expert Marion Nestle of New York University. “Interest in where food comes from is part of a growing social movement.”
Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food. In many cases manufacturers are alive to the notion that transparency about the source of their food is good for business. Sime Darby, a large palm oil supplier in Indonesia and Malaysia, is working with FoodReg, a firm based in Barcelona, Spain, that develops food-tracking software. The idea is to develop a system to prove to customers that its crops are not grown on land recently occupied by tropical rainforest. In remote regions where farmers don’t have access to computers, they can use cellphones to record onto FoodReg’s online database the time and place the crop was harvested. Tracking systems like this should also make it easy to calculate the distance that goods travel to reach stores, allowing consumers to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions racked up by the transport of their food. “The calculation of food miles and carbon footprint could be the killer application for traceability,” says Heiner Lehr of FoodReg. “The technology is there. If a big retailer puts itself behind this, it could happen very fast.”
Projects like this are interesting to me because I can imagine myself in the future making decisions about how and what I buy, based on the information that I am able to obtain about my various choices. In fact, it would be nice to be able to walk into the grocery store with the information seeking intent of finding a good source of protein (whether chicken or beef, or maybe even just beans) for the evening’s meal, and come out of the store with a product that not only fit my budget, but that I felt good about buying. But in order to make this information useful to consumers, there has to be some sort of search or information retrieval layer built on top of the data.
This is where the “I’m feeling lucky” model of simply trying to give the consumer an “answer” breaks down. Continue reading…
Via Paul Lamere, I came across this recent Google blogpost on large scale graph computing. I started reading, and quickly became excited by what I was hearing:
A relatively simple analysis of a standard map (a graph!) can provide the shortest route between two cities. But progressively more sophisticated analysis could be applied to richer information such as speed limits, expected traffic jams, roadworks and even weather conditions. In addition to the shortest route, measured as sheer distance, you could learn about the most scenic route, or the most fuel-efficient one, or the one which has the most rest areas. All these options, and more, can all be extracted from the graph and made useful — provided you have the right tools and inputs.
“Yes!” I thought. ”Yes! I am finally starting to see a growing acknowledgement from one of the Search Majors that when you have a goal-oriented topic, to get from Point A to Point B, there isn’t just a single, most effective, most efficient route. A user might actually want to choose — explicitly choose via input tools — different pathways through all the potential waypoints. Continue reading…
I would like to point to a post worth reading, over at Blogoscoped, about personal, blind side-by-side comparisons of the various contending search engines. I have seen studies like this for years, both on the web and in published, academic papers (see my earlier post). And this current, informal study continues to confirm what all the other studies have shown: When you strip away branding information, there is no clear winner from among the top-contending search engines. Maybe years ago, Google was leaps and bounds better than all the others. Today, it does not appear to be the case.
The reason I point out this informal study is not only to continue to raise awareness of the essential parity among the engines, but to point out something interesting that the author of the post (Philipp Lenssen) says: Continue reading…
Two pieces of recent news have my head spinning. Both are instances of technology companies acting in exactly the opposite manner from their ideals (and public statements). The first is Microsoft announcement of an open-source version of BigTable:
Instead of creating a proprietary copy of these pieces of infrastructure, Powerset decided instead to turn to Hadoop, [...]
Google is an information retrieval company that prides itself on the purity of its results. It does not allow the integrity of its ranked list ordering to be tampered with by sponsored results. It also has claimed for years that it does not engage in hand-coding (aka hand-crafting or hard-coding) of results. Everything that it returns in the non-sponsored, organic list is purely algorithmic, or at least only indirectly influenced by the hand of humans (e.g. relevance assessors and quality raters). The order in which a result is ranked will not be — as far as I’ve always understood Google’s position — hand-picked.
So I was much surprised recently to learn about a new initiative from Google that allows you to create a Google profile for yourself, which Google places into the 10th slot in the organic results when someone searches for your name! From the official Google blog:
To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, we’ve begun to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages…Don’t have a Google profile? Just search for [me] and follow the instructions at the top of the page to create one. In just a few minutes, you can create a public profile that represents you and that appears when people search for your name on Google.
How is this not hard-coding of results? Continue reading…
|
|
Recent Comments