Searching Walled Gardens…

I’m still getting caught up on podcasts that got the better of me recently, but the one that caught my attention was one of NPR’s Planet Money podcast about Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, and an effort to make certain media content “exclusive” and free to that search engine only.

Apparently, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are in talks where Microsoft would pay the Wall Street Journal to make its contents exclusive and indexed only on Bing and no other search engines.

I found this whole concept kind of shocking.  While I understand that news organizations have to find new revenue streams, I would happily go back to paying for getting the New York Times delivered to my inbox and  iphone rather than this model.  The idea that search will devolve into separate walled gardens, with parts of the ‘net only searchable on certain search engines seems to me to be against the very nature of what the internet was about- to make information open and “findable” in ways it never has been before.  And frankly, if I have to go to yet another website to see if the Wall Street Journal has a piece of news I might need, I might as well go to the WSJ site directly and search their site internally than use yet another search engine.

From Microsoft’s point of view, I can understand how becoming a site that indexes primarily news, for example, might seem like a great competitive advantage.  What it fails to take into account is that money alone isn’t the only thing that matters anymore.  News comes out via non-mainstream media news sites including the Huffington Post, Politico, not to mention the excellent tech blogs like Tech Crunch , Mashable, and Gizmodo.  News is no longer proprietary in the same way it used to be.

It’s going to be virtually impossible for Microsoft to make news a walled off garden, and even if they do, how will they keep people from re-publishing the same material via, say, a tumblr blog and making it easily indexed by Google as well?  Isn’t this just begging for a “Pirate Bay” solution if established?  How long before bit torrents of news are being siphoned out and placed where they can be indexed and re-indexed by any search engine?

There may even be some anti-competitive issues at play here, but as usual, the law drags so far behind actual technology, it will be years and largely irrelevant before that’s all sorted out.

The bottom line here is that information is a precious commodity, but news is only news for a short period of time before even in its old, traditional newsprint form, it starts lining bird cages and train puppies all over the land.  Information now flows faster than we can analyze and process its meaning, which means the value in this play is at most, temporary and ephemeral.

My largest objection is to turning the internet into a series of walled gardens regarding search, and how much more cumbersome it will make finding good and relevant information.  And as the ‘net has already shown us, in the absence of great and thoughtful information, people will simply propagate what is readily available, which may include rumor, innuendo and more.

The Bing/WSJ deal will be an interesting experiment if it happens, but I wonder what it will mean for the future and how long it can last in an economy where information is distilled down to bits and transmitted faster than Marconi ever could have imagined with the radio telegraph.

Tags: bing, Microsoft, planet money, WSJ

When is Good Enough Good Enough?

I was reading my latest copy of Wired Magazine (this and Fast Company are the best ones ever…) and this month they have a great article entitled “The Good Enough Revolution“, primarily discussing how the simple and good enough products succeed, like the Flip video camera.  I totally agree with this  concept- sometimes, what we are all looking for is something that works, doesn’t take too long to learn, and does what it’s supposed to, even if it’s not fancy.   That’s why people love point & shoot cameras, even the cheesy drug store kind; it’s why the iPhone is popular- all you have to do to operate it is touch it and it works (most of the time).  The article also goes on to talk about the rise of netbooks in popularity and why these stripped down machines are taking off.

So the question that’s come to mind to me is Why Bing?

Bing is, of course, Microsoft’s latest attempt at a search engine.  It’s trying to pair with Yahoo to gather their search business as well, to try to become an active competitor to Google, which now has about 2/3’s of the US search market, and its ad business.

As I was reading Time’s article discussing Bing versus Google, the good enough issue looms in the background.  I’ve spent years, ever since I first learned about boolean search in law school, perfecting my ability to ask the “right” questions to try to find the most relevant results.  Training people to construct better queries is actually probably more useful than my spending time learning the ins and outs of a whole different search engine.  Google is good enough- and better, since Google has all the other tools I use daily- from the Social Media Dashboard I’ve constructed on iGoogle, to Gmail, to Grand Central, to Blogger, to Google Docs- the Good Enough Microsoft Word, to Groups- Google works fine, its products all integrate and work together seamlessly, and for free.  Why should I switch to Bing?  Relevance is not as much as issue for me as good enough.

What’s interesting here is the concept of feature creep.  I’ve found each new iteration of Microsoft word just a bit more complicated and the features they add don’t significantly change what I demand from Word or solve any problems I have.  If I want a better program than Excel, I frankly just have to boot up my Mac and use Numbers, if the features, cloud access and storage in Google Docs doesn’t suit.  Google works for me because it keeps everything streamlined and simple.  I don’t have to go anywhere else to get my needs met in an integrated way.

So switching my allegiance from Google to Bing has a bit of an uphill climb.  While I am all for competition in search, and worry sometimes about how much of my life is owned by Google, the bottom line is the convenience and ease of use wins out every day.  I don’t need anything else.

Battling it Out For Free

While search makes huge amounts of money for companies while the service itself is free, you wonder how this battle over free is going to play out in the marketplace, particularly after reading to Chris Anderson’s great book on the topic.  Clearly, people are battling over revenue dollars, but for the public, free is free- how do you draw people away from one type of free to another?  How do we define better and more accurate?  That’s all in the eye of the beholder and in the composition of the search.  Can anything be better for free?  What happens once price has become a non-factor, and all we have to compete with is quality, where the very judgment of quality becomes highly subjective and becomes nothing more than an overt popularity contest?

I don’t know the answers to this, but I do know that, as Hugh McLeod from the Gaping Void has said, “The Market for something to believe in is Infinite”.  Search and our selections and differentiations between one product and the next seem to become less based on price, but more based on increasingly subtle and largely irrelevant feature differentiations between models. (Every look at the minute differences between LCD TV’s for example, and just decide to pick whatever one Consumer Reports likes?)

But what I really want is something inspiring and something to believe in.  And a new search engine just can’t get me excited, no matter how cool the commercials might be.

Tags: bing, chris anderson, gaping void, good enough, google, popularity, product differentiation, time magazine, wired

The Evolution of Search

I’ve started an interesting book called Kluge- The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus.  In the opening chapter, Marcus talks about how biological systems evolve with a “good enough” threshold, not always with the most elegant design imaginable, for a myriad of reasons we can talk about at a later date.  What struck me was his discussion of memory.  Computers, he points out, use something of a zip code type of order- everything is assigned a number or address, and can be found accordingly. The human mind, however, makes all sorts of memory errors all the time- we can’t find our keys, or our glasses resting on our heads, and according to one survey Marcus quotes, the average person spends close to 55 minutes a day looking for stuff they own but can’t locate.   Part of it is because our memories work in a largely contextual fashion, and we depend on other clues to help us remember where we put all our stuff.  (I don’t doubt any of this, having recently purchased a second audio recorder, having lost the first, thinking I must have lost it on a trip, only to have the thing surface in a weird spot about a week later.)

So, how does this apply to search online?  I love Google, and it does a good enough job 99% of the time.  If I am not finding what I want, I assume it’s  a human problem, meaning that my search query was bad, and all I need to do is reformulate a better boolean search to get what I want.  Having used boolean search in one form or another for almost 2 decades, first with Lexis-Nexis in law school and now daily with Google, I understand how the information I get is limited by the way I ask the question.

But in all this time, I miss what I call the “serendipity of the library” method of search.  I often have found that the books in the same neighborhood as the one I thought I wanted contain better information and are more to the point than what I was initially searching for.  The things further along on the shelf, or in the neighborhood (based on the good old Dewey Decimal System) sometimes are much better than what I thought I needed to know, and help me get the background knowledge I need to really solve my problem.

This is essentially because the mind works on contextual search.  I am crappy at giving directions, because I get places based more on landmarks and making turns in context (making it more difficult for me to find someplace new in the dark, of course) than by “Go south for three miles and then make a left.”  But I can give you all sorts of landmarks along the way to keep you from getting nervous that you missed a turn- driving and directions, for me, is totally contextual.  If they start building new stuff or tear things down, I will probably get lost, so this is not particularly adaptive, but it works good enough for me, most of the time.

Google and most online search engines are like the zip code directory- they are great at taking you from Point A to Point B, and suggest similar destinations, but they don’t have the fuzzy logic of humans built in.  This is why Mahalo, a human powered search engine, is such an intriguing idea- it fits humans and fuzzy logic back into the equation.  It’s also why Bing may not be the answer to search, even if it gives different results than Google- it’s still boolean based, and it’s results are only going to be as good as your queries.

Google serves up ads I rarely pay attention to while typing emails, based on keyword searches around what I am writing.  In some ways, these could be really intriguing ads- they are probably offering suggestions to solve problems I’m only just contemplating, without relying on the context of an exact query, but by trying to guess the gist of what I might be most interested in.    I can say that after thinking about the difference between logic based and contextual based search, I’m certainly going to pay them more attention than before as a result.

I don’t know how to solve the search problem, other than to teach kids (and adults) how to better construct searches in the first place, and that over time, maybe human based search, like Mahalo, will fill this gap by introducing important “neighborhood” fuzzy logic recommendations into the mix.

I know this is incredibly geeky, but as long as humans use contextual based memory to keep things organized; as long as we look for things based on context more than specific discreet pieces of information- only search involving more of that fuzzy, quirky logic will fill the bill, and look for what we want, decode what we really meant by the request, and simply begin to understand us when what we really want to ask is “I want to find that christmas song about the Abuella and the icicles, but I don’t remember the name of it or the artist.”  Not enough information for a good search string,  but wow, I’d love the answer to that one.

Tags: bing, boolean, fuzzy logic, google, humans, mahalo, search