Digital Black-Snouted Flying Frog: Objective Search Results
May 6, 2010
Pick a free online Web search service. Run a query. Are the results you see in your laundry list presented without regard to payment, bias, or some other digital tilt?
Tough to tell. At the Search Engine Meeting in Boston on April 26th and 27th, Dr. David Evans and I had one of our note-passing moments. Thank goodness he and I were not in the same math class. The professor would have taken our slide rules away and maybe banished us to the gym.
These notes presented below tackled the issue of objective search results and their becoming an endangered species in today’s rough-and-tumble marketplace.
We sketched and annotated a chart that looked like this:
The up swinging line suggests that as online users’ technical capabilities rise, the down-swinging line shows that objective search results have less value. The idea is that in the public Web search arena, subjectivity may be losing ground to objective selection and presentation of search results. The user * thinks * results are objective. The results may be subjective. If this supposition is true in a world of play for placement, online advertising, sponsored results, and the chicanery of search engine optimization experts, there may be some implications in world of Web search.
For instance, the type of search results from a service such as Delicious, Facebook, or StumbleUpon may be perceived as having more value. The idea is that if a person suggested a particular source of information and that person has some “connection” to the user, then the results may be more useful. Other possible descriptions of the results might be “trustworthy,” “accurate,” “non commercial”, or “reliable.”
In actual fact may be that these social results are as subject to commercial intent as the results in a Bing, Google, or Yahoo search list. That may not matter because there seems to be a flagging appetite for verification of information snagged from public Web sites. The demographic and social shift may be the prehistoric termites nibbling on the the intellectual foundations.
The passages below come from the notes that Dr. Evans and I exchanged in the course of our note-passing moment:
Arnold: I wonder if the interest in social media is a change in how people think about finding information. I think the social angle in the US is different from what I have experienced in China and Japan. Surprisingly there was some resistance to social media in Slovenia which contrasts sharply with the texting frenzies of the Chinese and Japanese.
Evans: In the US, we’re skeptical about authority (and resist the temptation to appear to conform to someone else’s opinions). This is not the case in other places (like Japan).
Arnold: Social is the new security problem. Information validity is an issue and some information is subject to manipulation.
Evans: It’s the network of associations that permits individuals to “suspend skepticism” and conform, cooperate, join in, etc. A kind of democracy effect. One network effect I have observed is the “rule of two”. If two acquaintances agree on a position, we’re likely also to agree.
Arnold: The social trend in the US is able to make factually incorrect information into “accurate” information.
Evans: Is this an Anglo-centric phenomenon? That is, is it a “sea change” only because we are Americans? In Japan, France, Italy, India and many other countries, social collaboration is the norm.
Arnold: The potential for misinformation is ratcheting upward in the US. Information can be shaped and the consumers of that information are unaware. Think of Fox News, which is owned by Mr. Murdoch. The information pushes an agenda, and despite its approach, the content gets wide distribution and is sometimes indistinguishable from information that does not have a slant or a political angle.
Evans: It’s ironic that a technology–digital computers and networks–designed to overcome limitations in human memory and ability to calculate probabilities and ground facts–would become the vehicles for and licensers of socially grounded points of view.
Arnold: It’s tragic that many individuals cannot make informed judgments about the information used to “know” something. The lack of information literacy gives social media in the US considerable potential for disinformational activities.
Evans: The Web has introduced noise in the information channel. It’s hard to distinguish one results of a search from another. The results “look alike” in a search results list. One might be from a respected research institution, another from a blog post. The attitude (banal democracy) has become, “Who can tell which is more reliable?”” We may be taking a huge step backwards.
Arnold: The digital Dark Ages? Figuring out which information is more accurate, reliable, or objective may be like finding a black snouted flying frog. A long shot indeed.
Stephen E Arnold and Dr. David Evans, May 4, 2010
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