I went to a conference yesterday by the AIIA on marketing predictions. While we started with Peter Williams from Eclipse (Deloitte) giving us a web 2.0 showcase: user-driven content, joy-of-use sites, mash-ups, hacking and good examples of user experience - the second presentation on "how to get google to love your website" left me stumped.
We are entering the "golden age of the networked economy" where users want to have more input and control over content but...
should we have incredibly long lists of search query text at the bottom of our screen and change the wording on our sites to bad English because Google says so (cos it makes us come up on Google searches?)I dont think so! Feels like a search engine dictating how i look at sites? I don't want to see back end stuff on the front, even it it is marketing spiel.
The more I use web2.0 the less I google. As much as I love it, I also love tagging and find half the stuff I need using social bookmarking, twitter and blogs. I would prefer to visit a site recommended by others, than a site recommended by the site-creators.
Maybe soon Google will have a 3rd search option.
Search: tagged content
What do you think?
About Me
- Jasmin Tragas
- Mum to 3 boys, wife to 1 guy, I publish ebooks for @problogger, and sometimes I like to read, enjoy art, appreciate food, do good, and discover new things.
4 comments:
I think you are onto something wonderwebby! Google lost their soul when they sold out, and we are starting to see the fruit (i.e. their disconnection from where ppl are headed, replaced by a corporate need to promote where they are invested!).
Here's another thought - as the long tail gets longer, more and more ppl are going to need more and more help finding the stuff they want/need. Peer-referred content is the future .. but not everyone is a Hungry Thinker like you wonderwebby .. so the research/analyse approach is not for the masses. They are going to need a superpeer .. a trusted source that makes reliable user-biased recommendations. The large corporates like google will try to take that space, but have NO hope of filling the role. It all comes down to integrity and trust .. so proven individuals with a long tail of objective, quality recommendations will win the day.
Sounds like a job for wonderwebby :)
I think you have touched a very important point wonderwebby. Its about (and should be) about the people and the user not about the corporate and dictation by them on how the user should conform. Creativity and ingenuity does not come from conformation.
However, i think search does have an important place. I love the concept of referred content that is from a trusted peer. I give links via your blogs and probobo's blogs much more priority and importance than what i find otherwise. However, there are times when i need to "find" information that might not be directly available via my trusted peers - or more likely - it is available, but hard to find as there is a lot of information on various things.
I think what the presenter touched on was "abuse" of the system... any search engine will have an "algorithm", and people will try to crack it for selfish gain. So i think we do need "search" - but i don't believe google is the answer. Google did sell out, and now its nothing more than JABAC ("just another big american corporate") ... search google.com for "tiananmen square" and then search google.cn for "tiananmen square" - the difference in results are startling! I'm sure the chinese deserve to know that "tiananmen square" is more than just a "popular gathering place for tourists and kite flyers"!!!!!!
Google is evil... it is definitely evil... but its less evil than any other corporate most other corporates i come across...
As for content via peer's ... i think you an onto a brilliant thing... i vote for you to start the revolution too :-)
thanks pr0b0b0 and c0ts0d0d0 and welcome to the wonderful world of wonderwebby ;)
I'm chuckling because at the conference, the panel response at my observation was "nooo, not google" - maybe because people think they are a superengine that will be around forever...
I guess what I am imagining is a search engine using user-aggregated tags from del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, technorati etc which then spits out top hits when you search.
But what would I know? I am not a techie girl ;)although pr0b0bo your response made me cringe at my attrition of geekspeak. Maybe I am slightly techie after all!
wonderwebby, you're every bit the geek probobo and c0t0s0d0 are :-)
i think the idea of user-aggregated tags is great... but when it becomes mainstream it will have its fair share of problems with spam etc... perhaps if it was introduced with a "trust level" so that aggregations from your peers are treated with higher priority ... that would minimise spammy results...
"make simple things simple, and hard things possible"
- one of the motto's for perl - by larry wall :-)
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