@ironick and I have been arguing about the shape of the internet since my September 2010 post on this subject. Over the past few days, we have returned to this topic on Twitter. Nick has captured the latest tweets in his Storify piece The Shape of the Web - Database Wars Redux.
The argument was triggered by @djbressler's observation that some new browsers (including an experimental build of Chrome) were hiding the URL from the user. This is a reflection of the fact that users increasingly type "Amazon" into the browser rather than "amazon.com" let alone "http://www.amazon.com". Presumably, hiding the URL will further encourage this trend.
Google and other search engines appear to benefit from this in two ways. Firstly, it increases the already heavy dependence of the ordinary internet user on the search engine. And secondly, every time an internet user navigates via search rather than via URL or hyperlink, the search engine gets another opportunity to present some advertising, as well as collecting more information about that user.
Obviously, Google itself depends on URLs and hyperlinks. As Nick points out, Google still relies on links to construct its index, and still uses a version of the original PageRank algorithm to influence what you see when you search for a given term. But indexing and search ranking are only loosely coupled to one another.
And nowadays, the search order is not solely determined by PageRank. Instead, the search order is increasingly influenced by browsing behaviour - of others as well as our own. If you ignore the first two items, click briefly on the third item, and then immediately return to Google to look at the fourth item, Google may conclude that the first three items weren't very relevant to you. In other words, this counts as a "vote" against those items.
Meanwhile, Google only had exclusive rights to the original PageRank patent (which belongs to Stanford University) until 2011.
Obviously Google is not completely open about these algorithms, because it is perpetually at war with SEO and spammers who want to get some commercial advantage by "gaming" the system. So there is a degree of speculation involved in working out what exactly Google is up to. Sometimes Google merely seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator, as David Auerbach suggests in his review of Metafilter search results ("Deranked"). However, it is beyond speculation that Google's behaviour has become increasingly sophisticated over the past decade, and that what we see is increasingly "personalized".
Nick accuses me of "confusing the use of behavior IN the ranking algorithm itself
with using behavior to verify the quality of the algorithm". However, there is some evidence that Google initially trials new factors in parallel with the existing algorithm, before integrating these factors into the algorithm itself. (See for example, Google Panda.) In any case, the total behaviour of Google can be thought of in terms of the collective intelligence of human brains AND algorithmic software, and it may not be possible for outsider observers to be exactly sure where the boundary lies at any point in time. (We can detect "momentum", but not "position".)
Obviously URLs are not going to disappear entirely. For my part, I have always made an effort to use links and bookmarks rather than pander to the commercial interests and cognitive distortion of search engines. I don't think this undermines my general point - that the Internet-in-use (based on majority habits) is taking on a different shape. Obviously it is still possible to use the Internet in a disciplined and self-conscious manner, which Nick (always) and I (sometimes) practise, but the fact that this requires effort and intelligence makes it likely that it will never become mainstream.
In the long-term, Google may face a paradox. If people stop using URLs, then Google's ability to index and rank pages across the internet might possibly be compromised. But I'm sure that the clever people at Google have thought of this paradox, and already have a cunning plan.
Meanwhile, the internet (as experienced by ordinary users) is gradually becoming less web-shaped and more star-shaped, with your favourite search engine or social network at the centre. (Please note the word "gradually".)
Sources
David Auerbach, Deranked - Why has Google forsaken MetaFilter? (Slate May 2014)
Bill Slawski, The New PageRank, Same as the Old PageRank? (March 2012)
Daniel Sour, It Knows (LRB October 2011)
Related posts
What shape is the internet (September 2010)
What shape is your intranet (May 2014)
Updated 17 May 2014
Showing posts with label topology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label topology. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Saturday, May 10, 2014
What shape is your Intranet?
@djbressler tells us he is working on a thought-piece about the bifurcation of the intranets from the Internet. In the meantime, in a post called Burying the URL (May 2014), he comments on an experimental build of Chrome, which continues the trend of hiding the URL and encouraging people to use search instead. Obviously it benefits Google when people rely exclusively on search. But it's not just Google's Chrome that is doing this; Firefox and Mobile Safari are also going in this direction.
In my post What shape is the internet (September 2010), I said that shifting the emphasis from URL hotlinks to search undermines the idea of the internet's being web-shaped. This point is also made in a post by @apike, referenced by David and also called Burying the URL (April 2014).
When David talks about bifurcation, he means that "enterprise IT is diverging enterprise technology from consumer technology in a way that’s creating two irreconcilable branches of technology". He observes that most company intranets have a pretty lousy search facility.
But most company intranets have pretty lousy cross-linking as well. They are mostly just pdf graveyards stuffed with documents of indeterminate pedigree, which people are often reluctant to waste time searching (even if the search facility were better) because they don't expect to find anything of value.
Actually, you can't always find what you are looking for on the Internet either, and that has a lot to do with the limitations of search, but there are enough amusing distractions to conceal this fact. Surely we don't want our company intranets to copy the internet too closely?
And remember that the data revealing Enron's problems were cheerfully displayed on the Enron website. But nobody important had bothered to look at these documents properly. (Actually, a bunch of students had analysed them years previously and concluded that Enron was bankrupt. They probably got low marks for that assignment!)
There is an increasingly common belief that the technology used inside companies should work the same way as outside, should provide the same "affordance". This is not Bring Your Own Device but Bring Your OwnParadigm Expectations. I guess I should work on a thought piece about this.
Related posts
What shape is the internet (September 2010)
Bring Your Own Expectations (May 2014)
See also Steven Poole, The pdf graveyards can only expect an increase in their undead populations (Guardian 9 May 2014)
In my post What shape is the internet (September 2010), I said that shifting the emphasis from URL hotlinks to search undermines the idea of the internet's being web-shaped. This point is also made in a post by @apike, referenced by David and also called Burying the URL (April 2014).
URLs are the essence. They make hypertext hyper. The term “web” is no accident – it refers to this explicitly.See also an excellent Twitter debate following @apike's tweet.
When David talks about bifurcation, he means that "enterprise IT is diverging enterprise technology from consumer technology in a way that’s creating two irreconcilable branches of technology". He observes that most company intranets have a pretty lousy search facility.
But most company intranets have pretty lousy cross-linking as well. They are mostly just pdf graveyards stuffed with documents of indeterminate pedigree, which people are often reluctant to waste time searching (even if the search facility were better) because they don't expect to find anything of value.
Actually, you can't always find what you are looking for on the Internet either, and that has a lot to do with the limitations of search, but there are enough amusing distractions to conceal this fact. Surely we don't want our company intranets to copy the internet too closely?
And remember that the data revealing Enron's problems were cheerfully displayed on the Enron website. But nobody important had bothered to look at these documents properly. (Actually, a bunch of students had analysed them years previously and concluded that Enron was bankrupt. They probably got low marks for that assignment!)
There is an increasingly common belief that the technology used inside companies should work the same way as outside, should provide the same "affordance". This is not Bring Your Own Device but Bring Your Own
Related posts
What shape is the internet (September 2010)
Bring Your Own Expectations (May 2014)
See also Steven Poole, The pdf graveyards can only expect an increase in their undead populations (Guardian 9 May 2014)
Thursday, September 16, 2010
What shape is the Internet?
These days the "web" metaphor tells us less and less about the true topography of the Internet.
The current discussion started for me when @ironick quoted @Microsoft "The Web is about sites, and your browser should be, too." and asked "What's the difference between a site and an app?" @Cybersal quoted @dtapscott's alternative "web not about sites but platforms 4 collaboration". So @ironick asked "What's the WWW really a web of? sites, apps, pages, data... "
My first observation is that if the Internet is merely a collection of sites, apps, or even platforms, then it's not exactly a web. The word "web" appears to focus our attention on the connections rather than sites themselves. There are of course two kinds of connection that exist in the Internet, which we could roughly categorize as syntactic and semantic. A syntactic link is a hotlink coded in HTML, while a semantic link involves some kind of content relationship. For example, you'll note that in this blogpost I've gone to the trouble to add hotlinks to the tweets by Nick and Sally: if you wanted, you could go directly to Twitter to check their exact words. (Go directly to Twitter, do not pass Google, do not collect 200 cookies).
But even if I hadn't added the hotlinks, you'd still be able to find Nick and Sally and their Tweets, by copying their names or their words into a search engine. So I'm creating a semantic link just by referencing something that exists somewhere on the Internet, even if I don't tell you its exact location.
The original hypermedia experience was largely dependent upon syntactic links. For @ironick "the web still feels like hypermedia 2me: clicking from context (page, song, video, snippet, site, app) 2 cntxt 2 cntxt 2..." I agree that it often still feels like that, but I find that a lot of my Internet browsing these days involves typing terms into search engines, and I don't find myself following long chains of hotlinks. In other words, I tend to regard the semantic links as more interesting and more useful than the syntactic links.
Here are some of the many problems I experience with syntactic links
Of course, there are problems with semantic links as well, above all the danger of over-reliance on the chosen search engine. But I still feel I'm more in control of the experience.
When we talk about the Internet as a world wide web (WWW), the word "web" seems to suggest a network stretching endlessly in all directions, allowing and encouraging the kind of browsing experience Nick mentions. But of course the fly's experience of the spider's web is quite different: being caught in one place, trapped for the benefit of the spider. For a long time, it has been the desire of major internet providers to trap users in one place: this desire is now apparently satisfied whenever users do not stray more than one or two clicks away from their favourite search engine or social networking site. Maybe that's what Microsoft is getting at.
Related Posts
What shape is the internet (continued)? (May 2014)
What shape is your intranet (May 2014)
The current discussion started for me when @ironick quoted @Microsoft "The Web is about sites, and your browser should be, too." and asked "What's the difference between a site and an app?" @Cybersal quoted @dtapscott's alternative "web not about sites but platforms 4 collaboration". So @ironick asked "What's the WWW really a web of? sites, apps, pages, data... "
My first observation is that if the Internet is merely a collection of sites, apps, or even platforms, then it's not exactly a web. The word "web" appears to focus our attention on the connections rather than sites themselves. There are of course two kinds of connection that exist in the Internet, which we could roughly categorize as syntactic and semantic. A syntactic link is a hotlink coded in HTML, while a semantic link involves some kind of content relationship. For example, you'll note that in this blogpost I've gone to the trouble to add hotlinks to the tweets by Nick and Sally: if you wanted, you could go directly to Twitter to check their exact words. (Go directly to Twitter, do not pass Google, do not collect 200 cookies).
But even if I hadn't added the hotlinks, you'd still be able to find Nick and Sally and their Tweets, by copying their names or their words into a search engine. So I'm creating a semantic link just by referencing something that exists somewhere on the Internet, even if I don't tell you its exact location.
The original hypermedia experience was largely dependent upon syntactic links. For @ironick "the web still feels like hypermedia 2me: clicking from context (page, song, video, snippet, site, app) 2 cntxt 2 cntxt 2..." I agree that it often still feels like that, but I find that a lot of my Internet browsing these days involves typing terms into search engines, and I don't find myself following long chains of hotlinks. In other words, I tend to regard the semantic links as more interesting and more useful than the syntactic links.
Here are some of the many problems I experience with syntactic links
- Sometimes the links aren't provided at all.
- Thanks to an aversion to deep linking, many websites only provide a link to the home page.
- Sometimes the links don't go direct but via some tedious aggregator or intermediator page. Spurious links whose sole purpose is to manipulate the search engines or generate advertisement traffic.
- Sometimes the links take you somewhere boring or irrelevant or obvious (like a Wikipedia page), not-safe-for-work, or someone's idea of a joke (not Rick Astley again).
- Often the links are compressed, so you can't see where you are being led. (No, I don't want to watch a YouTube video right now, thank you.)
- Often the links contain all sorts of other coded information, to pass contextual information to the receiving website.
- And then to cap it all, half the time the links don't work for you anyway, because they are out-of-date, or because the person providing the link has a subscription and you don't, or because there is some kind of context or syntax error.
Of course, there are problems with semantic links as well, above all the danger of over-reliance on the chosen search engine. But I still feel I'm more in control of the experience.
When we talk about the Internet as a world wide web (WWW), the word "web" seems to suggest a network stretching endlessly in all directions, allowing and encouraging the kind of browsing experience Nick mentions. But of course the fly's experience of the spider's web is quite different: being caught in one place, trapped for the benefit of the spider. For a long time, it has been the desire of major internet providers to trap users in one place: this desire is now apparently satisfied whenever users do not stray more than one or two clicks away from their favourite search engine or social networking site. Maybe that's what Microsoft is getting at.
Related Posts
What shape is the internet (continued)? (May 2014)
What shape is your intranet (May 2014)
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