Are You Fisherman or Pescatarian?
This past week, Paul Constant at The Stranger responded to a comment made by Zite CEO Mark Johnson. Johnson claimed in an interview with the Huffington Post that, “The web is getting too big for search.” Constant concluded in his short piece on the Slog that search isn’t “going anywhere soon.”
Constant is right, but only because of the profound, multi-level stupidity in Johnson’s comment. Perhaps he can be excused in that he was obviously speaking with his marketing voice on, though overlooking the stupidity of businesspeople is a slippery slope. Zite, an iPad app that bills itself as a personalized news magazine, runs on search functions; they don’t create content, but rather deliver the content based on user preference, much like a search engine does. The question, and Constant does allude to this, isn’t whether search is going away, but to whom users are relegating search, and what the end result looks like.
It all comes down to personalization, which anyone who reads any technology news at all or even watches much television can tell you is the word in search. Google Social Search is taking on Facebook’s social dominance while Bing is banking on the same dominance by partnering with Zuckerstein’s monster, both claiming to offer the most personalized search experience. And it makes sense because Johnson wasn’t wrong when he talked about the sheer, exponentially increasing vastness of the data available on the series of tubes.
The underlying addendum to that fact is that most of the vastness is crap. Personalized search’s implicit promise is to help users avoid the mind-numbing uselessness of the majority of web content. The troubling problem with personalized search is that it only delivers what a user already believes he or she wants, and this contributes to a narrowing of worldview. This phenomenom is the already apparent result of the fragmentation of broadcast and print media; with more options for news, for example, users/viewers/readers run little risk of encountering anything that challenges currently held beliefs.
There is another layer here, too, as Douglas Rushkoff eloquently describes in his recent book, Program or Be Programmed. Personalized search puts users another step further away from the actual work being done. We have become merely application users, slaves to algorithms, with little connection to the programming, the actual tools, on which the applications are based.
Blogging provides a useful correlate. When personal blogging was becoming popular, it was often questioned whether blogging was just a fad. Clearly, we can say now, it wasn’t (you are, after all, right now, reading a blog); the use of blog publishing tools just changed. People who had run personal blogs have largely abandoned them for social networks, because, to the bloggers, they weren’t “blogging,” they were sharing and connecting, and now new tools achieve that same function more easily.
Instead of the rush to personalized search, to further surrender of our control over and connection to tools, why can’t we ask for a better, broader selection of tools? Consider the possibility of Bottom Feeder, the search engine that only returns results from sites with fewer than 1000 hits, allowing you to comb the unknown and potentially valuable content that exists miles away from the mainstream web. The true beauty would be how quickly this content would turn over - the maximum hit limit would mean that pages would quickly age out of that search. Or SaleFreeSearch, that only searches pages with no commerce functionality.
The point is, web denizens are, with personalized search, perhaps becoming better consumers of fish, when what they really need, if information is to continue to be free and accessible, is some better fishing rods and a tackle box with enough diversity to allow us to become the various kinds of fisherman one individual might choose to be.
