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’ results? The problem of legibility is a larger social problem at a time when so many things are wrapped up in questions of identity. Who are you? What do you care about? What defines you? As someone who has always been a fan of the shadows in life and the beauty of the undefined, identity is a frightening thing. Whatever happened to Whitman’s barbaric yawp of self-contradiction? Why must everything be so clear? For the next few posts I’m going to look at legibility in a few different contexts to try to tease out some of the problems this quest entails.