@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 user experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label user experience. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Bring Your Own Expectations
Once upon a time, there was a clear separation between Work and Home. This separation has been undermined by two phenomena.
1. Working at Home - in other words, allowing work to invade the home environment
2. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) - in other words, allowing personal devices to invade the work environment
In this post, I want to talk about a third phenomenon, perhaps more invisible but no less important. Bring Your Own Expectations means that we have all become accustomed to getting what we want from the Internet, and therefore expect to get the same things (or "affordances") from corporate systems and platforms.
One of the most obvious gaps between our expectations and corporate reality is the failure of search. The Internet has an uncanny knack of guessing what we want, and there are strong commercial incentives for Amazon, Facebook, Google and the rest to improve their "mind-reading" capabilities.
In comparison, your company intranet is simply not in the same league, and therefore cannot anticipate your needs in the same way. Some people see this as merely a technical lack, to be addressed by some functionality inside the company firewall that roughly resembles the way Google worked ten years ago. But this is far more than a mere technical shortcoming.
And search is just one difference. There are also expectations about interoperability. For example, do we expect to use one network for linking with colleagues and customers, and a different network for linking with friends and family? Most people are still learning how to manage these different worlds without getting muddled - for example, people who automatically put kisses onto private messages may find themselves carrying this habit into corporate communications. Maybe sometimes our expectations lead us astray.
Some service providers (including notoriously Facebook) insist that you have a single identity for personal and business use. Other service providers accept that people may wish to have two or more accounts, in order to keep personal and business use separate, and are happy to design premium services largely for the business user. A good example of this is DropBox for Business, which allows multiple accounts (e.g. a business account and a personal account) to be synchronized to the same computer. However, people will still expect to have at least as much affordance in the business sphere as in the personal sphere, and will be unhappy if their employer provides (for example) corporate file-sharing services that are not as good as (say) DropBox. (Other file sharing services are available.)
Related Posts
BYOD Bring Your Own Device (Feb 2012)
On Working At Home (March 2014)
What Shape is Your Intranet (May 2014)
Updated 5 November 2014
1. Working at Home - in other words, allowing work to invade the home environment
2. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) - in other words, allowing personal devices to invade the work environment
In this post, I want to talk about a third phenomenon, perhaps more invisible but no less important. Bring Your Own Expectations means that we have all become accustomed to getting what we want from the Internet, and therefore expect to get the same things (or "affordances") from corporate systems and platforms.
One of the most obvious gaps between our expectations and corporate reality is the failure of search. The Internet has an uncanny knack of guessing what we want, and there are strong commercial incentives for Amazon, Facebook, Google and the rest to improve their "mind-reading" capabilities.
In comparison, your company intranet is simply not in the same league, and therefore cannot anticipate your needs in the same way. Some people see this as merely a technical lack, to be addressed by some functionality inside the company firewall that roughly resembles the way Google worked ten years ago. But this is far more than a mere technical shortcoming.
And search is just one difference. There are also expectations about interoperability. For example, do we expect to use one network for linking with colleagues and customers, and a different network for linking with friends and family? Most people are still learning how to manage these different worlds without getting muddled - for example, people who automatically put kisses onto private messages may find themselves carrying this habit into corporate communications. Maybe sometimes our expectations lead us astray.
Some service providers (including notoriously Facebook) insist that you have a single identity for personal and business use. Other service providers accept that people may wish to have two or more accounts, in order to keep personal and business use separate, and are happy to design premium services largely for the business user. A good example of this is DropBox for Business, which allows multiple accounts (e.g. a business account and a personal account) to be synchronized to the same computer. However, people will still expect to have at least as much affordance in the business sphere as in the personal sphere, and will be unhappy if their employer provides (for example) corporate file-sharing services that are not as good as (say) DropBox. (Other file sharing services are available.)
Related Posts
BYOD Bring Your Own Device (Feb 2012)
On Working At Home (March 2014)
What Shape is Your Intranet (May 2014)
Updated 5 November 2014
Monday, April 03, 2006
Werner Vogels on Scalability
Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) has just posted some notes about Scalability, which he defines thus:
A service is said to be scalable if when we increase the resources in a system, it results in increased performance in a manner proportional to resources added.
Scalability is relevant for tools and methods. I have been shown demonstrations of tools that look pretty cool when you've got five web services, but are pretty hopeless when you've got five hundred or five thousand web services. What does a tool do when you have more objects than can reasonably appear on a screen - even with scroll bars? Was the multi-screen, multi-user option conceived from the start, or does it look like an afterthought?
See also Scale and Self-Organization (July 2007)
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