By James Curcio
Over the past few years, I've noticed that it is increasingly difficult to find what you're looking for online. Of course there are (or were? wow) services like delicious. But the issue I'm talking about is signal to noise. There's a ton of information on the net. As Carl Sagan would say in his Kermit-the-frog voice, "billions and billions
of" interwubs. How can we parse it, and find what we need? What about when we don't even know what we need?
This problem is of course how Google has built its empire, especially when it paired this with the concept of ad placement. (Though advertisers themselves are still primarily thinking in non-interactive ways, even when they call it "interactive." subject for another post.) Every time Google puts out a product/service that helps with that, it seems to do well, and whenever they try to enter the social media sphere... well, that's yet again a subject for another post.
Here's the situation. Maybe you can relate: I'm talking to a friend and want to find a video I saw the other night to show them. It takes thirty minutes trying to track down a video that I know is there. Kind of slows down the pace of the discussion, you know?
He says, "yeah, one day they will create algorithms that will make all of this easier."
I think this is precisely the issue: this idea that we should just rely on machines to sort through the noise and somehow know what we're looking for. That the entire brunt of the responsibility falls on our search devices. It's a simplistic view of how information is structured, organized, and how we can deal with it in an increasingly complex, chaotic environment.
The problem is not a "lack of the right algorithms."
The problem is manifold. Let's look at it.
