14, The Search

Quotes taken from ‘The Search: How Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture’ (2005) by John Battelle

Page 1 - The Database of Intentions
“The library of Alexandria was the first time humanity attempted to bring the sum total of human knowledge together in one place at one time. Our latest attempt? Google.” (Brewster Kahle, entrepreneur and founder, the Internet Archive)

Page 19 – Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How (Much)
“Judge of a man by his questions, rather than by his answers.” (Voltaire)

Page 262 – The Perfect Search (Search as the New Interface)
… A9 has broken search into its two most basic parts. Recovery is everywhere you’ve been before (and might want to go again); discovery is everything you may wish to find, but have yet to encounter. A9 attacks recovery through its search history feature and toolbar, which tracks every site you visit. The discovery feature finds sites you might be interested in on the basis of your clickstream and – here’s the neat part – the clickstream of others…

Page 263-266 – The Perfect Search (The Semantic Web?)
But perfect search will require more than ubiquity, clickstreams, and personalisation. The vast corpus of information now available to us is often meaningless unless it is somehow tagged – identified in such a way that search engines can best make sense of it and serve it up to us. Many in the search industry believe search will be revolutionised by what is called metadata. Clickstreams are a form of metadata – information about where you go and what you choose as you browse the Web. But to get to more perfect search, we need to create a more intelligent Web. That means tagging the relatively dumb Web pages that make up most of the Web as we know it today with some kind of code that declares, in a machine-readable universal lingo, what they are, what they are capable of doing, and how they might change over time.

This is the vision of the semantic Web… While it’s always dangerous to lean too heavily on metaphor, the basic idea is that with semantic tags, the Web becomes more like a structured database… making it far easier to find things. This in turn allows the rules of logic, or reason, into the equation.

This structure also makes it easier to do things, to execute complex tasks built upon finding things – scheduling a meeting, planning a trip, organising a wedding, you name it…

But a major hurdle to the rise of the semantic Web has been standards: who gets to say which tags are right for which pages? If there is a picture of a Cape Cod seashore on the Web, should it be tagged as “beach”, “shore”, “ocean”, or any number of other possible words? As Yahoo learned early in its directory days, the nearly limitless possibilities of the Web do not lend themselves to top-down, human-driven solutions.

Again, this is where the Force of the Many comes in. In late 2004 and throughout 2005, a new kind of tagging scheme arose, one based not on any strict, top-down hierarchy, but rather on a messy, bottom-up approach. Small start-up companies like Flickr, Technorati (a weblog search engine), and del.icio.us (a link sharing site) began giving their users the ability to tag anything they saw, and then to share those tags with others. By letting anyone tag anything, the theory goes, ultimately a kind of fuzzy relevance for any given item will emerge. The photo of the Cape Cod seascape, for example, will probably be tagged with all the possible descriptors. That way, no matter what phrase a person uses to search it, whether it’s “ocean photos” or “Cape Cod seascapes,” the photo will be found.

Early bloggers dubbed this approach folksonomies – folk + taxonomy – and the movement is gaining momentum…

Page 280 – Perfect Search (The search for perfection)
Whatever your first search moment was, there will be many, many more as the space evolves. Search is no longer a standalone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the World Wide Web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge. Perfect search – every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contexualised, perfectly personalised – may never be realised. But the journey to find out if it is just might be is certainly going to be fun.