原文来自artima.com
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First there was the Internet, and then came the possibility ofputting up web pages. People started making pages containing lists ofother pages that they liked, and that’s how you found those pages.Essentially, by word of mouth.
Pretty soon there were far too many pages for people to find by wordof mouth. We needed a way to search for things on the web. All theusers knew this long before the first search engines appeared, and whenthose showed up they were pretty sucky. Understandably, the companiescreating these search engines were concerned about how they were goingto make money doing it, and this may have been more of a concern thancreating a good search engine.
Finally, Google came along with clever ways to do search anda way to monetize: targeted advertising. The jury is still out onwhether this advertising is all that effective, but it seems obviouslybetter to give people links to what they might be interested ratherthan slamming an ad for your thing in front of absolutely everyone.
I remember when Google first appeared; I found out by someonetelling me, in person. Other companies eventually realized that peoplewanted to actually search for what they wanted and so fixed theircompeting search engines (in particular, those engines that gave higherpriority to paying advertisers without telling you stopped, or went outof business).
In the meantime, the number of pages have continued to growexponentially or geometrically or by some other power function. And theeffectiveness of Google searches has been diminishing for awhile now.If you’re looking for something, you have to put more and more workinto finding what you really want.
(Web 2.0, which seems primarily to be “a way for users to putinformation back into the web,” has only had the effect of adding morepages to the Internet, so it’s part of the problem).
At the same time, newspapers, once the gatekeepers of information,have not been able to cope and are rapidly going out of business(albeit with thrashing along the way, but without any hope that theywill reinvent themselves to fit into the Web). First to go are thepeople who’ve been paid to collect news and give perspective on events;last to go are the advertising folks.
Apparently even television viewing has taken a big impact because ofthe Web. It’s even possible that people have started to trust theopinions of random people on the Web more than they do those oftelevision news — as if they suspect that advertisers are influencingthe news.
So people are going to the web for information, and theinformation-seeking machinery has already gotten creaky and is failing.What do we need next so that we can continue to solve the problem?
Not just searching, but filtering.
I’m not sure how this will work, but we need it. We have alreadyseen some attempted solutions for the problem. The most obvious one ispeople who make lists of things they have reviewed. If you trust thatperson, you look at their list. For example, Kevin Kelly’s Cool Toolsis full of interesting things he and his group have researched; I’vebought a number of items he has recommended. I have also found the Best Free Software List to be invaluable. Once you find reliable lists your life becomes vastly easier.
An essential aspect of recommendations is that you trust the personwho is doing it. The problem here is that if money changes hands, trustis reduced or eliminated, so how does the person make money for thetime they invest? Dedicated amateurs are great but they can only do somuch. Google ads might become a sort of disinterested intermediary, butI have my doubts.
We’ll still use search engines, but those engines need theadditional option of only searching trusted resources, things thatcan’t be gamed. There might also appear trust levels, at the top ahuman who has acquired some large number of “trust points” from users.
I think for any of this to work, we will need to solve the problemof digital identity. As long as people can remain anonymous, everythingcan be gamed. And it’s holding us back. (I don’t advocate that you beidentifiable, just that you have a unique identity so no one canpretend to be you, and you can’t pretend to be thousands of people). Ifnothing else, it could eliminate spam overnight.
Will Google solve the filtering problem? I wonder if they can, orwhether they’ve gotten stuck in the mire of their one trick. Perhapscompanies only ever get one trick, and then the success that ensuesbogs them down with collective stupidity. I’ve heard hints of a lot of interesting ideas coming out of Google, but those ideas never seem to materialize.
For example, I’m quite sure I once heard they were thinking of adsthat only cost the advertiser when a customer purchases. Would you haveany trouble buying such an ad? It would be a no brainer, since you’d betaking no risk at all. This approach might be prevented by the lack ofdigital identity.
And Google is spending lots of time and effort preventing its searchengine from being gamed, and dealing with AJAX issues — things thatdon’t move it forward. They seem to be making inroads against PayPalwith their much-more-attractive Google Checkout, but I haven’t seenmany big improvements in that for awhile. In general, the kinds of newthings I’ve seen from Google seem like those that could come from muchsmaller, less-well-funded companies.
From the user’s standpoint, the next big thing will be filtered,trusted information. Although the existing players like Google andYahoo would seem to be the ones that would pull this off (oops, Iforgot to mention Microsoft. Why is that?), it appears more likely thatwe’ll see it come from a new player with a fresh start on the problem.(I shall continue to be vexed by the fact that the big, successfulcompanies aren’t going to create the next big innovation).