Posts Tagged ‘search engines’
All posts tagged search engines.
Back in the old days – or the ’90s as some call them – we utilized the Internet as an information resource. What’s that phone number, where is that address, where can I buy that product – you had concrete questions and were no longer required to speak to a human to get answers. Sure, there were bulletin boards and Usenet forums for discussion but they primarily involved coding arguments and game walkthroughs. The Internet wasn’t truly upended into a community, and all that that entails, until just a couple of years ago. It was then that the inundation of bloggers collided with social networking and lifestreaming to produce a perfect storm of content. (And when I say lifestreaming, I mean the trend of putting as many pieces of our life online as possible – books we’re reading, music we like, etc.) We’ve now backed ourselves into a corner online, raging against the indundation of content even as we scroll through our fifth page of FriendFeed updates. We recommend well-written articles about navigating through the noise, right after sharing 25 items in Google Reader.
The logical next step in this technological journey is to therefore prune, to make our time online more meaningful and relevent, no matter how small the nugget of information. Whether I’m setting out to qualify findings in a drug discovery experiment or wondering when Amy Winehouse was last arrested, I want the most reliable, relevant answer in the shortest amount of time. The problem is no longer whether the information is out there but rather how we can get to it quickly and accurately.
It’s against this background that I’m seeing a gradual evolution of the semantic search market. Read the rest of this entry »
Chris and I engaged in a lively discussion via Skype this morning regarding the merits of Rushmore Drive, a new search engine targeted to African-Americans. I heard about it from SheGeeks, who stated quite clearly how she feels about the service. Especially after hearing Rushmore Drive is under the same corporate umbrella as Ask.com, my immediate reaction was also one of dismissal and “what the hell are they thinking?” You may remember my own rant a couple of months ago about Ask’s development of a search engine targeted to suburban women in the Midwest. My point then – that the path to search success lies in broadening rather than narrowing your audience – holds true with Rushmore Drive. Assuming a group of people wants results from a limited pool denegrates the audience and simply doesn’t hold water.
Chris isn’t necessarily a fan of these sites either but she can’t help but put her experienced analyst hat on and deliver some opposing points. Her argument is that engines like Rushmore are serving a viable subset within a demographic that vehemently holds on to that demographic as their identity. There are enough of those subsets in any demographic to create a business; the question of how big that business is remains to be answered. She concluded by allowing that there are some issues she might turn to a women’s site over a general one, assuming they’ll have better information, i.e., health-related such as breast cancer, pregnancy, or menopause.
It’s easy to deliver emotional responses to such a model, as it’s inherently personal. That, after all, is the intended effect of the engines. Unable to differentiate algorithmically from the Google way of search, these companies are instead aiming to add a personal layer. If I can’t necessarily deliver a better search result to you, dear user, I’ll try appealing to your gut. Who are you and with whom do you identify? It’s a philosophical/psychological approach and it’s risky. To work effectively, the engine must excise some results and/or bring others to the fore. Who’s making that determination? Can one possibly write an algorithm to home in on female or African-American search results? I doubt it and I think that’s the point.
Technology should be blind to race, gender and creed. If you want to appeal to a demographic, create a destination site. Pack it to the hilt with what you think are appropriate links and material and let it be sourced by a general search engine. But the very nature of search is and should be egalitarian. Attempting to attract certain groups of people by rearranging their search results is, at best, touting a product for what it doesn’t do. And that to me, seems bad business.
What do you think?
The recent hubbub over Wikia Search had many questioning the wisdom of tech stalwarts Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina. What were they thinking, introing a rudimentary search app that delivered poor results? At varying times called a “practice run,” “doom [for] Wikia as a business,” and my personal favorite “weapons grade fail,” seasoned tech bloggers were unrelenting in their criticisms. After talking with Gil earlier this week, though, I think the most interesting angle on this story has been MIA. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s a lot of anger in the air these days. It’s the nature of blogging, I suppose – dash some vitriol off and you’re guaranteed to start a conversation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; better to generate emotion of any kind than none at all. But it can also be damaging to the very essence of entrepreneurship. If ideas are met with too much resistance, will the tap eventually dry up? Will innovators become too afraid to put themselves out there, lest they anger the blog gods? The answer depends on who you are.
I talked with two companies recently that have been on the receiving end of some anger. Wikia Search rolled out its alpha to a chorus of “What the hell is this?” Company execs responded, “It is what is,” able to do so because of a supportive community and a general agreement that the search sector needs innovation. At the other end of the spectrum lies Story2Oh, an intriguing little project started by screenwriter Jill Golick, who wanted to dip her toe into Web 2.0 and got smacked down harshly in return. Read the rest of this entry »
Loading ...