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Find Vs Search

So amidst all the hype around Bing, I gave it a whirl, to see if it really was all that and a bag of chips. Yes, it’s pretty. And yes, it’s got some nifty little features (although I personally detest the auto-play of videos on rollover – is clicking really that hard?). But few would disagree that Google’s pretty much nailed the issue of effective and efficient search (leaving aside the challenge to its hegemony posed by the likes of Twitter in real-time search). And I can’t see that the most important thing about Bing is the name itself – even if it is a backronym for But It’s Not Google.

Although the exact components of the Google algorithm are notoriously secret, it’s well-known that the number of links to a given site, and the quality of those links, is a core driver of PageRank. Which is great, although the wisdom of crowds isn’t always tremendously wise – it can be gamed and it doesn’t have the intuition to know what you’re after.

Which is the inherent issue with search. You query, it scrapes and brings back the results. Great, but often the real value is in find, rather than search.

As this article in Business Week highlights, we need human filters to find information for us, to add value via recommendation:

The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to.

One of my former clients was a well known telecoms enquiry provider, and central to their core proposition was the value of find vs search. But even intelligent search doesn’t have the value of a truly curated find from a trusted source. Google Squared is admittedly seriously bloody impressive. It scrapes the web for “data structures on the web that imply facts”, to structure unstructured data and give you a table of organised results. Companies like Mahalo, and indeed my former telco client, position themselves as providers of human-powered search, whilst Wolfram Alpha describes itself as an answer engine. These are all well and good, but an engine can’t (yet) make truly personalised recommendations the way a likeminded friend can.

Engines like Aardvark are trying to offer personally relevant recommendations – by harnessing your own friends, so it’s essentially a redirection service. Aardvark users add the service to their email or IM buddy list: you can then email or IM it a question, and the engine checks your network of participating friends (and friends-of-friends) to find someone who might be able to answer it. But friends must have signed up with Aardvark to be considered, and they can control whose questions come to them, and when. OK, it’s early days – as of April 2009 they claimed 10,000 users. But at the moment this social search engine is still just a connection service – matching you with someone who’s willing and able to answer your question in real time.

The value of influencers within social networks is huge – hence why the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are investing heavily in teams of sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists to better understand who we trust & pay attention to, how and why. But as research from Facebook’s friendship laboratory shows, the most valuable interactions depend on reciprocal relationships:

To rival the power of human find, the killer engine would have to be able to sift through data to find the most relevant results for us, based on its understanding of our likes, preferences and behaviours. And there’s the rub. To do that we need to engage in a reciprocal relationship. The more data and behaviour we share, the better recommendations we’ll get back. But it’s a very different matter to share this level of personal information with companies – who will ultimately look to monetise their offering – than with our friends. We want to have our cake and eat it. We want an engine to understand what we’re after and provide us with exactly what we’re after – but we’re not (yet) comfortable with giving out the information the engine would need to achieve this. It’s an incredibly fine line, but the company who’s able to crack it and truly harness the power of personalised find will really move search to the next level. Within this context, for all its claims to be a groundbreaking ‘decision engine’, doesn’t Bing feel rather more like a gentle hop in the evolution of search, rather than a revolution?

June 10, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | 1 Comment

Possible futures of Twitter visualised

Lovely infographics today on Flowing Data looking at the various ways Twitter could develop in the future. There’s a lot of buzz about the potential challenge Twitter poses to Google in the field of real-time search, and the open API has allowed numerous applications to be developed – if this trend continues, how could we be using the service a year from now?

The above graphic (by Brian Solis & Jesse Thomas) shows all the current incarnations of Twitter data while the below (by Steve Rubel) looks to map Twitter’s possible future – click for full size versions. V. nice.

[ via Flowing Data ]

June 2, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Unplugging in the here and now

Technology is bloody great, isn’t it? I absolutely love my Macbook, my iPhone, ubiquitous connectivity via 3G and wifi, the ability to be plugged-in 24-7.

But more and more, actually taking a step back from our hyperconnected lives and simply unplugging can be be a Good Thing.

If you’ve not already done so, I recommend reading John’s recent 2 day experiment to try leading his highly-connected, highly computer-dependent life without his PC, and Iain’s experience of Mental Detox Week last year. Or Lucy Kellaway’s Before Personal Computers experiment. You get the idea.

Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman spoke about this at GeeKyoto, positing the notion of a secular sabbath – one day of the week when you unplug and step off the grid for 24 hours. Whilst orthodox Jews observance of the sabbath (all work is forbidden, no use of electricity, cars, telephones etc) is in order to devote the day to prayer, the original focus of the secular sabbath was saving energy. But it’s also a way to have one day a week where you’re free from the distractions of your hyperconnected life to truly experience the offline world (cynics might call this Real Life).

I’ve been thinking a lot about the tension between the awesome benefits of technology and hyperconnectivity, and the sheer information overload that comes with it. That sinking feeling when you see the number of unread items in your RSS reader or inbox. That pile of photos waiting in iPhoto to be uploaded to Flickr and tagged. Those delicious links you bookmarked but still haven’t got round to reading. The backlog goes on.

But the idea of a backlog isn’t anything new – To-Do lists with endless un-done tasks have been around for ages, it’s just that what we’re not keeping up with is changing (and arguably accelerating as the sheer pace of available information speeds up).

What I think’s more interesting is the tension between simultaneous use of technology and our real-time real-life experiences. When you’re so busy trying to take photos that you spend more of your time behind the camera trying to capture where you are and what you’re seeing and doing, that you don’t really experience it. When you’re at a conference, talk or seminar, and you’re so busy trying to live-blog or tweet it that you simply don’t have the mental capacity to really digest what’s being said (the same arguably goes for lofi notetaking, so even when you’re scribbling in your moleskine, you’re still not 100% there in the moment)

The idea of continuous partial attention is fascinating, and there’s lots of different schools of thought about how our constant multitasking is affecting our brains and the way we process information. But leaving that aside, however we manage multitasking, it’s hard to avoid the fact that when we’re doing two things at once, we’re less able to truly focus on the experience of the here and now.


Missing the here and now?

As I mentioned above, even this isn’t exactly new – people have been taking holiday snaps for years, and note taking is hardly a new art. But technology facilitates this in such a way that the sheer volume of opportunities for lifecasting or capturing information are more than ever before:

As we progress through our short span here on this planet, living our lives and documenting them along the way, we may be forgetting…for moments at least…how to actually live. And living, like it or not, means that sometimes we need to disconnect, put the camera down, and enjoy a moment for once.

Technology is great – but are we forgetting to live?

I’m incredibly guilty of this. One of the most frequent tips for SXSWi n00bs was to leave the damn laptop at home, not only because you’ll avoid having to lug it around, but because you’ll get so much more out of the panels if you’re actually there in the here and now, rather than frantically trying to capture what’s being said to be the first one to blog it (or bitching about it on the Twitter backchannel!). Although there’s another school of thought on this entirely, the subject of another post, methinks.

More than ever I think the idea of a secular sabbath is bloody appealing. Or just putting the damn camera down and experiencing the here and now. After all, what use is a perfect record of our experiences, if we never really got to experience them in the first place?

March 21, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | 3 Comments

National Hack The Government Day

Open access to public data is a Good Thing. Collaboration for social good is a Very Good Thing. I’ve posted before about the Power of Information Task Force’s Show Us a Better Way project (on behalf of the government), and the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign – both of which I urge you to check out and support.

The FT recently wrote an article about the power of hack days to drive innovation – it stands to reason that if you get a load of really talented people in a room and the freedom to go nuts, you get amazing stuff out.

So Rewired State have issued a call to arms:

Government isn’t very good at computers. 
They spend millions to produce mediocre websites, hide away really useful public information and generally get it wrong. Which is a shame.

Calling all people who make things. We’re going to show them 
how it’s done. If you can make things, and think you can do better than government 
signup below.

I’m really really hoping this doesn’t get me into trouble. I work on a lot of COI business at Naked, developing communications strategy for different government departments, including Directgov – the government’s consumer-facing information portal, offering ‘public services all in one place’. But I know they would absolutely admit that it’s very much a work in progress, as the rollout of the transformational government programme evolves. And they’re definitely open to external input & innovation, as evidenced by the newly launched Directgov Innovate developer network, and the fact that Directgov developers participated in UKGovCamp and will be joining in Hack the Government Day. So I hope if anyone I work with reads this, it’s taken in the spirit which it’s intended – that initiatives which work to improve access to public information and services are a great thing, wherever they come from.

So, if you’re a designer, a coder, a creative thinker – if you make stuff, and want to make stuff for the common good, to improve public information and digital services – then sign up for National Hack the Government Day.

Here endeth the non-party, non-political broadcast.

February 6, 2009 in Technology | Permalink | Leave a Comment
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