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In a recent response article, Danny Sullivan takes Forbes CEO Spanfeller to task on the whole Google vs. The Newspapers issue. There are a lot of things I agree with Danny about, and an equal number of things that I disagree with. But I feel compelled to propagate one nugget from Spanfeller:
Spanfeller: Search is not really all that great at the moment, a comment repeated time and again by much more astute folks then me. This is especially true when looking for high-quality professionally created content. This is not to say that user-generated content or ecommerce options or product specs should not be returned in search results, simply that there is clearly a better way to showcase the different paths an end user might be pursuing. The idea that everyone is forced into trying to “game” the system so that they get their “fair” (or sometimes not so fair) share is testament to how terribly wrong this entire process has become.
This excites me because I see in this statement an acknowledgment and realization that Exploratory Search and HCIR (“showcasing”) is necessary. Sullivan, however, completely misses the point: Continue reading…
Apropos to my post yesterday, Technology Review has a short comparison of Wolfram Alpha and Google. Here are a few samples:
Here’s what I entered, and what I found.
SEARCH TERM: Microsoft Apple
WOLFRAM ALPHA: I got side-by-side tables and graphics on the stock prices and data on the two companies, plus a chart plotting the price of both stocks over time.
GOOGLE: The top hits were mostly news stories, from major and minor publications, containing both words.
And.. Continue reading…
It is good practice to rotate the mattress on your bed, to prevent lopsided wear-and-tear from shortening its useful life. The same thing applies to car tires; they need rotating. Smart travelers know to rotate the airlines from which they purchase tickets, as the accumulation over time of per-ticket better prices often outweighs the rewards or miles than comes from a single airline’s loyalty perks. Even the internet itself works by allowing packets of information to dynamically rotate across different routes, based on traffic congestion, rather than tying up a full end-to-end circuit.
So why wouldn’t you rotate your search engine usage? Continue reading…
Via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter, I came across this article by Vanessa Fox on how government can improve the findability of their web pages, and thereby allow citizens to become better informed and government to be more transparent. Fox writes:
Continue reading…
It has now officially been ten years since Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto, rekindling and reminding us of the centuries-old notion that markets are conversations between people, buyers and sellers. The following are a few of the Manifesto’s points that resonate with me:
Continue reading…
Well, the move comes 9 years after I suggested it to ‘em, but Google finally launches a music service:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/03/reuters_us_google_china
Now, my only question is whether they have simultaneously been researching and implementing intelligent search algorithms to go with the free music downloads, or whether they have been too busy moving Microsoft Office into [...]
Daniel Tunkelang continues to raise provocative and interesting questions over on his blog. I would like to point readers to the comments section of a recent post. In one of my own comments there, I raise a question about ad-supported web search engines (as typified by, though by no means limited to, Google) and their willingness and ability to switch business models. In particular, I express the following consternation:
Continue reading…
PBS has an interesting article on the new media gatekeepers and the need for transparency in the process by which they promote media. Here is an excerpt:
The problem for these new gatekeepers is that they are providing the old editorial functions, but there’s a key difference between the way they operate and the [...]
There is an an interesting comment thread happening over on the FXPAL blog, about the differences between social search and collaborative search:
http://palblog.fxpal.com/?p=350#comments
Continued from Part 1.
Now that I’ve fully (perhaps too much so) explained the analogy that I will be using, I’d like to ground this discussion in the subject of information retrieval. And I’ll start with an example that O’Reilly used in his talk: Google. (This is an Information Retrieval blog, after all, and Google was the example that Tim used.) The company, he says, successfully exhibits both long term and evolutionary thinking. It takes the long term view through its very mission statement: “To organize the world’s information”. What could be more long term, more global, than that? At the same time, Google has a very evolutionary approach in that it starts with simple, elegant solutions and couples them with ongoing user measurements. If and when changes to Google’s engine are made, they are made based on small evolutionary steps that become apparent through the actions of the user. It’s a point of pride within the Google organization that every change to the engine is scrupulously measured and A/B tested so as to be able to tell whether the change was better or worse. The user provides the fitness function, the arrow that points in the uphill direction, toward which the search engine evolves.
So the question is, does Google suffer from this conflict between long term and evolutionary thinking? My contention is that they do.
Continue reading…
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