It seems to me that google is in a weird way the old high school popularity contest recreated on its head. By privileging sites with a great number of inbound links, it makes certain popular sites rise to the top of the pile. While this may produce relevance, a worthy goal, it may [...]
Though search engines are fixated on meeting their users’ needs (they should be anyway), too little control is given to the user in determining their own fate. There should be many more tools for users allowing them to help give the engines data to fine tune their algorithms. For example, it should be [...]
Finding someone is a sometimes baffling endeavor. There are lots of great services now where you can spell out exactly what you want online and be matched up through various profile points to potentially compatible individuals. I found my partner before the online dating services were really developed, so I still remember when [...]
The quest for relevance in search results seems largely focused around determining user intention. Are you shopping? Are you looking for pictures? Are you just wasting time? In pinpointing intention to fulfill these needs though something is potentially lost. How many great sites have you found for example from ‘irrelevant’ [...]
While I am actively engaged in commercial search marketing, what interests me about search is not only how you make money from it, but more significantly what our ways of exploring tell us about the world / thoughtspace we inhabit and are constantly altering. We are as a society becoming increasingly tribal, with a [...]