The people involved in that behavior are key parts of our economy: Informers, Decision Makers, Students and Consumers.

These key people at best expose themselves to a maximum of 30 entries per search. In general through they "see" none but the first 3 entries for any given search.

The Big Deal

This majority share of attention for a minority portion of information, combined with the illusion of relevance through ranking of results, constitutes their main impression of you, your company, your brand.

Here's What That Means

After a Google search showed that published psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar had used LSD in the late 1960's, he was rejected entry into the USA and is no longer welcome in that country.

Says a USA Customs and Border Protection agency spokesman; "If you are or have been a drug user that's one of the many things that can make you inadmissible to the United States."

One: are you sure about that early afternoon Vodka tweet you just published?

Two: how difficult is it to rank you as a drugs pushing kingpin?

In 2007 a man who had been missing for years mysteriously reappeared, having no recollection of what had happened.

While police and other investigators were still flabbergasted a single mother typed "John Anne Panama" into Google. The first image that came up is the one that solved the case and got John Darwin behind bars.

One: which photos of you are out there on the net? Do they support your story (whether the story is private or corporate branding is irrelevant).

Two: which of those photos could be made to harm you?

If you're one of the world's largest technology companies and people search for the scanning software you bundle, what are they to think when out of the first 5 results only one is positive? (Compare with K Mart, Tim Hortons and Purina who do better job of trying to control the conversation; top award goes to Nescafe which apparently has never ever done anything else but make great products, support faraway places and in general, page after page, has been nothing but a swell company…)

Here's What It Could Mean

The "3 first results" view we have on search is the Internet's equivalent of the 10 second sound bite.

Right now Obama's and McCain's results are quite clean, partly, I believe, because these searches are monitored for quality. Certain crap spam won't make it into these results until the election is well behind us.

But highlighting certain things from the past by making them come up through certain searches; this, I predict, will become common place.

Offensive SEO, so to say, will become common place. It will be sneaky and hard to trace as you can't monitor nor investigate every single search.

Matching good or damning "3 first results" to key and fringe searches will become as common place as buying AdWords for those searches is right now. Only AdWords is easily traceable, this isn't.

The key here is that you don't need to own the "conversation", you don't need to have every single blog post under control. You need to control the top 3 entries.

The task to build or destroy, improve or damage, might be much easier, much simpler, than we thought.

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Search: Controling the Conversation

In the real world (for geeks define:real world) finding undesirable information can be a lot harder than you would think.

From how to make a bomb (includes easy links to related searches like how to make a bomb with household items and home made bombs) to how to commit suicide (user-friendly links to the related searches painless ways to commit suicide and methods of suicide) and from what happened in Kashgar China to US military equipment in Iraq, some questions, depending on where and when they are asked by whom, can raise red flags.

Some questions you, parents, or government organizations would rather not see so easily answered.

It's true that it's the anonymous, large-scale nature of the World Wide Web that makes the dissemination of this information terribly simple. But it's search, and only search, that makes it useful, findable, accessible.

Without Search you'd find yourself at the equivalent of walking into a bar, asking for an illegal passport, some cocaine and an illegal gun: it doesn't work that way.

Without Search you'd need someone who knows someone who knows someone. And depending on the what and the someone's, you need credibility, need to be able to be trusted, before you're introduced and moved on towards the next stage.

As media companies are starting to look towards ISP's to filter illegal file sharing, so law enforcement agencies will increasingly look to Search: the door through which easy access can be gained can be easily closed, allowing only certain information in and through, condemning the rest to obscurity and through obscurity to exposure by forcing those interested out into the open.

In essence, for any party concerned, be it a parent, an employer or the law, there is no need to monitor websites visited, emails sent, instant messages made; one only needs to monitor Search to follow and understand the direction and development of someone's interests.

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Search and Undesirable Information

When we're in need of a corner store there's no reason to pick up the Yellow Pages or get Google buzzing; you know.

But obviously we also have business that should worry about search and its meaning.

A perfect example is pizza delivery.

Unlike the corner store, which location you'll remember years after leaving it or it leaving you, the telephone number of the pizza delivery service we used last time is apt forgotten. I know you give out those cashier slips with the phone number printed in Blue Ink (Faded #18) or hand out those full colour menu fliers but dude… I'm eating pizza. By the time I recover from my calorie induced coma, pizza, pizza box and all accompanying paper work are long gone.

So, what's a hungry man to do?

If you're my age, which means your first mouse was a live one back in the days when you could and own a calculator with red Light Emitting Diodes as a display and be cool not in spite of it but because of it, then you're going to flip open a Yellow Pages and be done with it.

If on the other hand you're born more recently, you might just go to Google and ask for "pizza your location"

What I find interesting then are the differences between these two models: differences that have had and continue to have a real economical impact.

Search & How It Limits

The majority of searchers won't go farther than 3 pages deep into their search results. That's 30 entries. Most of these searchers will see only the first page and on the first page they'll mainly see results 1-3.

That's an impressive break with our former information digestion when searching for economical transaction partners. Flip open a Yellow Pages, I just did, and you're pretty soon counting 30-40 telephone numbers there. That's on a page with several large ads. If you let your eye fall on the accompanying page you've scanned 60-80 entries.

For a business this means that you can be listed but not ranked: the first search results page is the equivalent of letter A listing in the past only this time nobody is looking further. You're on one of the pages but nobody cares.

Economy through obscurity is as bad as security through obscurity. Unfortunately it's precisely what a search engine, or rather our way of using it, has to offer to the majority of businesses listed .

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The Economic Impact of Search

That means that at any given time your children and mine are likely to access the World Wide Web in order to answer a question, find school material, corroborate facts, and learn.

Search + Research = Skill

Searching the web to find responsible, verifiable, genuine information of the professional or educational kind is a skill. Like all skills, it's an acquired one.

Purely technical there are search operators to learn. political freedom, political freedom -site:wikipedia.org, and political freedom site:edu are, after all, different searches with substantially different expected levels of quality of search results.

It's not only important to teach that the results of these searches aren't impartial, objective or in some logical order but that they're ranked according to a calculation which combines measures of relevancy and popularity.

It's important to show that how this is measured and calculated differs from search engine to search engine. Doing our .edu search about political freedom on Google, Yahoo and Live returns quite different search results.

As the grouping of 10 popular titles might suggest to the searcher a topic, value, philosophy, relation, causation, agreement, majority angle or even truth that's simply not there but for the grouping of the results, these differences are not to be overlooked.

Just as important as the differences between the major search engines is knowledge of specialized search engines. Thomas from the US Library of Congress has different information on political freedom than the NTIS' fedworld.gov will, while both are totally different from the Libarians' Internet Index directory.

Evaluation

With 10, 30, 50 or 100 results in front of them, how is your kid going to pick and use the really good ones?

The fact that the search results are ranked has to have a tremendous impact on her perception of these results.

In a library our search would return alphabetically sorted authors or book titles. Each source would appear once. There would be no way to distinguish between Nationality in History and Politics (Friedrich Hertz, 1944), The Supreme Court and Fundamental Freedoms (George W. Spicer, 1959) and Ignorance and Liberty (Lorenzo Infantino, 2003) but by taking them off the shelf, checking what they say, seeing who they reference and, later on, who references them.

On the web however the order in which we see these titles has been arranged in such a way as if to convey relevance, meaning, value. Is popularity-based ranking relevant?

Likewise, which indicators can there be of a search gone wrong? Which signals indicate that a SERP might contain too many junk entries?

Going deeper into the results, to the sources it references, and thus outside the scope of what we're thinking about here, search, we would have to teach how to verify the validity of a source, of what it claims, teaches and postulates. This is a deep skill and one that will only become more valuable over time. For example, traditionally the "barrier to bullshit" has been much higher with the cost of publication, distribution and audience access for books being manifold that of a web site. Thus publication by itself was already one filter applied. With that cost removed the filter has been removed too.

Responsibility

Now, your kid has to learn these things, master these skills, in order to make it. And we're not talking about a far-off day when she'll need it at work either: it's now, today, when she's going to do her homework. It's next week's school paper she should be able to write without you grabbing the mouse in panic going "whoaaaa!!!!!"

In the best of worlds this would be taught at school. But you know what? I'm already happy the 133MHz Pentium machines (I'm not kidding you…) were upgraded last year to 512 MB 266MHz ones… OK? Besides which, they've just gone through a reform. I don't know where you live but I bet yah there's been a reform just now as well. Or was last year or will be the next. And with everything that we already think schools should teach, I'm not so sure adding Advanced Search to the list will help.

So that leaves you and me and the publishers of titles like "Google for Complete and Utter Idiots… dimwit…"

Which is kind of great because as it happens, you and I are also co-responsible for the overall quality of search.

Small, funny, ironic world, isn't it?

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Search and Teaching Your Kids to Research

We look at them from the search engine optimization angle, from a marketing angle.

From the user side we're geeks. Part of the 49% of internet users who use a search engine on a typical day, you're already part of a minority – albeit a large one. But within this group of regular users we're the power users. We use operators during searches and have others wonder how they can speak with one at Google.

We – bloggers, online marketers, SEO'ers, SEM'ers, spammers and what not – we are the digerati. We live what's coming.

But what is that exactly? Or rather: how is that? How is it different from 10 years ago? 20 years ago?

On this Friday, one that is all rainy and gray and autumn-y here way up north, I'd like to pour us a coffee and kick that back and forth a bit. I don't think we've time to explore all in this one sitting but why limit ourselves? We can come back later on, right?

Search & Research

It's not long ago that every search, even the web-based ones, meant research. Access to AltaVista and HotBot didn't mean instant answers to spur-of-the-moment searches.

Many searches led to SERP's filled with spam. In order to find what you were searching for you had to become a pioneer of the multi-word query, add modifiers. You had to be willing to go beyond page number; way beyond.

I think that has changed sufficiently that the top 1000 queries people come up with give pretty reliable, usable results: the first 10-30 results will most likely be at least "good enough".

Instant Search

The aspect, the ability, of instant search is something that has to change the landscape; changes the landscape.

Sitting at the telephone, chatting about whatever with whomever anyone can now be as knowledgeable or as informed as a member of a support team who has access to a knowledge base.

Someone names someone: and you can know who it is right now.

Someone quotes someone: and you can find out from whom right now.

Someone goes somewhere: and you see where that is right now.

Information & Knowledge

This has to impact people who need information (students, consumers, lawyers, investigators, etc.), those who facilitate information (telephone operators, librarians, archivists, etc.), and those who work with and transform information (knowledge workers … of which you are one).

Why?

Over the past 20-30 years the definitions of what is information and what is knowledge have changed regularly.
Academically you often encounter a "knowledge as information" approach.

The two, information and knowledge, touch each other and overlap each other so much that often they indeed do seem and one the same. Yet intuitively, however dangerous a path that might be sometimes, we recognize a difference between the two as we acknowledge the existence of both.

I think that knowledge goes beyond singular information. It's "knowing the lay of the land". Having a mental map of information and information points, if you will.

"But can we consider knowledge in a different light, as design rather than information? That would mean viewing pieces of knowledge as structures adapted to a purpose, just as a screwdriver or a sieve are structures adapted to a purpose. You know your friend's phone number–so you can call when you need to. Moreover, your knowledge is well-adapted to the purpose; the number is only seven digits long and well-rehearsed, so you can remember it readily. You know the layout of your town or city–so you can get to work, to your home, to the airport, wherever you want to go. Again, your knowledge is well-adapted; if you have lived in a place a while, you probably have a rather comprehensive "mental map" of the area that you can apply not only in finding places you normally go to but in navigating to new locations in the same area. Similar points can be made about knowing the rules of chess or your favorite foods."
– Knowledge as Design (1986) DN Perkins

The accumulation of information, one's perception on it, one's reasoning about it, grows a wealth of knowledge. "Knowledge about the facts" goes beyond simply being aware of their existence: it's understanding them.

In such a terrain knowledge workers walk through the whole city, exploring every nook and cranny. They know what is where and how it relates to each other. They know not just a street, a shop, an address, a telephone number; they know and understand the city itself.

At the other hand of the spectrum we would have information seekers provided with instant information. In a terrain setting this is akin to teleportation. These people have the ability to arrive at their destination but have 1) no idea how they arrived there, 2) no idea of their surroundings (all other data points).

Meanwhile the information facilitators, the city guides, have no reason for existence. Or a diminished one. The worker's knowledge of the lay of the data land and the information seeker's ability to hop around in it at will remove the need for an in-between.

Put another way, facilitators hand out calculators that help seekers to the Final Answer that 8^0=1 … but it's only the mathematician who understands why that is so.

Information is the bricks the road of knowledge is made of. Having direct and immediate access to the Final Answer reduces the amount of information we're exposed to. Instead of plowing through numerous books, flipping magazine pages, reading bits about this and that, we jump right away to The End.

Many of those Final Answers combined will again form knowledge, no doubt, but it does strike me as if, ironically, in the Information Age a wealth of information is tossed out, bypassed.

The knowledge worker image comes from a slide from Merlin Mann about attention management. The lady browsing a table with books in Sant Jordi, Barcelona, is a wonderfully recognizable shot by Nacente. The coffee was a delicious Van Houtte San Fransisco espresso. Background music provided by Radio Paradise.

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What Search Means To Us