Archive for the 'Search' Category

Collateral Search and the Decline of Intention

Published by Jarred on June 14, 2010 in Search. View Comments

John Battelle has famously described search engines and their collection of search queries as a database of intentions:

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward.

The key to his description, of course, is intent.  Sally is interested in a new umbrella, so she goes on Bing to search for umbrellas.  Bob wants to know the score of the latest World Cup game, and he jumps on Google to find it.  Amanda wants to find a quick headache remedy, so she fires up her browser and tries a search on Yahoo.

People who work on search sometimes refer to this as the “lean forward” experience.  You have an objective  or an “intent” for your online journey, and you are using a search engine to achieve that objective or satisfy that intent.  As you search, you leave behind artifacts of your exploration for the search engine to analyze: the keywords you used, the results you clicked, your location, and even whether you came back to the search results quickly (a sign that the page you went to didn’t quite fit) or decided to stick with your chosen result.

The aggregation of these expressed intents provides useful insight into what the world finds interesting.  One way that Google exposes this information is through Google Trends, which shows the top search keywords and topics in real time.  Google Flu Trends takes the same approach but filters for flu-related queries only, which rivals other sources at predicting the outbreak of influenza.

But as modern life becomes increasingly digital, and more and more devices and everyday objects sprout a connection to the web, the idea of search as “intent” may start to give way to a different phenomenon: the “lean back” experience.  Or, what I would simply call “collateral search.”

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Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?

Published by Jarred on January 14, 2009 in Book Reviews, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Search, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. View Comments

About a year ago, I wrote that I had received a book for Christmas called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr.  I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was only two weeks ago, on my post-holiday flight back to California, that I finally finished it after ten months of letting it collect dust.

Carr’s attitude about the rise of cloud computing, social networking, and all the other web 2.0 buzztrends caught me off guard.  While he seems to marvel at and mostly celebrate the speed and scale at which this phenomenon has grown and subsequently become integral to modern life, he does so with a very cautionary and sometimes pessimistic tone.  I guess I should have expected as much after reading his piece in the Atlantic last summer (hat tip to Joel for passing it along) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  Though I don’t share all of his concerns, it is refreshing to find a voice like his among the generally over-enthusiastic technorati (myself included).

Carr highlights a particularly interesting threat in the chapter he titles “The Great Unbundling.”  While granting that the jubilation over the democratizing and barrier-lowering nature of the Internet is mostly well deserved, he also warns that these characteristics come with potential harm.  What harm?  In short, Carr argues that the speed and personalization offered by the Internet facilitate our natural human tendency to cluster into isolated groups that can deafen and blind us to differing opinions.

Carr’s main evidence is an experiment conducted in 1971 by a Nobel Prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling.  The experiment consisted of a grid of squares and a set of white and black markers.  After randomly distributing these markers to represent an “integrated” community, he moved the markers around based on the rule that no one marker could have more than 50% of its immediate neighbors be of the opposite color.  This rule, Schelling posited, mirrored a natural instinct that humans possess: to be closer to people similar to ourselves than we are to those who are different.  After moving pieces one at a time based on this rule, he ended up with one all-white cluster and one all-black cluster.  Self-segregation, Schelling concluded, is the natural result of our instinctual preference to be closer to those that resemble us than to those who differ from us.

Extrapolating from these results, Carr hypothesizes that because the Internet removes so much friction from the market for information, self-segregation will happen much more quickly and completely online than, say, in a once-integrated neighborhood that slowly segregates over many years into two or more distinct socioeconomic or racial groups.  In my opinion, however, his interpretation of Schelling’s experiment, and his application of it to the Web, is flawed from the start.

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Do You See What I See?

Published by Jarred on April 29, 2008 in Computing, Google, Privacy, Search and Web 2.0. View Comments

The Problem

Unsurprisingly, the ever-innovative Google is conducting intensive research into improving image search.  The web giant’s mission – ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — requires that its computers be able to interpret and index images, in addition to text.  To date, as Mike Arrington explains, computers have not been so good at this:

Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.

One approach to solving this dilemma is giving humans an incentive to label images themselves (see my earlier post on human computation).  Luis Von Ahn, the brain behind Google Image Labeler (an addictive game that pairs users together to attribute labels to images), says that all the images on the web could be sufficiently labeled in a short amount time with a critical mass of participants; to drive home his point, he often references the millions of potentially productive hours that go wasted on Solitaire each year.

There are two major shortcomings to this approach.  First, it is still completely text based — what happens when a certain image is only labeled in a certain language, or when pranksters “Google bomb“ image results (imagine every result for “miserable failure” being the face of George W. Bush)?  The second, major shortcoming of this approach is that there are untold numbers of new images being uploaded to the Internet every day.  Flickr alone gets as many as one million new photos from its users every 24 hours.  Is a human-centric approach to putting images in context sustainable?  Google doesn’t think so, and so it is beefing up its computer-based image search strategy.

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Monday Links: April 14th, 2008

Published by Taylor on April 14, 2008 in Business, Cooking, Culture, Education, Energy, Environment, Monday Links and Search. View Comments

Happy Monday. I decided to start the week (sharing with coworkers, naturally) with Whole Wheat Apple Muffins, following this recipe from Smitten Kitchen. Del.icio.us. (nerd joke!). Enjoy a few links as you consider how good an apple muffin would taste right now (answer: unbelievably good).

  • Could Google benefit from asking users to input their race before searching? The NY Times reports on Rushmore Drive, a new search engine that delivers search results catered to specific racial groups. The company behind Rushmore Drive started with an African-American focus, but plans on expanding to other races; from the article:

[The site] offers search results that, at first glance, border on stereotypes. A search query for “Thanksgiving recipes,” for instance, yields sites featuring recipes for sweet potato pie and collard greens. But according to Johnny Taylor, the chief executive of Rushmore Drive, the results are based on years of search data from IAC’s Ask division.

Rushmore Drive analyzed search results for 3,000 of the most popular search terms in areas with large black populations and found that when people in those areas searched for recipes, they were much more likely to click on pages with soul food. Those searching for hair products, dance, cars, fraternities and sororities also ended up on vastly different Web sites than people who lived in areas with smaller black populations.

  • Here’s a quick Fast Company featurette on the new D.C. Nationals ballpark. It’s the first professional ballpark to receive LEED certification. Can’t wait to catch a game (or 3) there in May
  • This is old news, but in case you missed it (or didn’t understand the details), here’s a Washington Post article describing the new partnership between Google and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The U.N. will use Google Earth to draw attention to the plight of refugees around the globe and to illustrate their forced emigration.
  • [slaps head for not thinking of this]: Here’s a simple idea for storing your ever-growing list of frequent flier/hotel reward program/valued shopper numbers…file them away in your cell phone under a specific heading. Brilliant…the Internet is a beautiful thing.

Happy Monday.