Category Archives: Old new media

Extended “did you mean…?” or What is wrong to know, Google?

- simone
1

Google, how will you avoid unintentional censorship?

Imagine a search engine capable to predict the real meaning of user’s queries beyond their knowledge gaps, we are not that far.

The spelling auto correction tools could be extended to let users know something that everyone else already knows, beyond the present knowledge of single users.

A search engine used as a knowledge tool, is still a search engine? Can we search something we did not imagine that exist? Google already proved that we can search for something we don’t even know the correct name yet. How deep can you go, Google?

I feel like an elastic rubber band, between my ideas of a free knowledge market and customer’s will to do some business together. Google seems to experience a similar (not yet painful) division between what Google can give for free and its ads.

This month I got more conversions from Facebook Ads than from AdWords. Maybe I’m just a poor marketer, but maybe something is changing.

Update: Maybe a lot of little numbers will give us some answers, just like a lot of lines can draw something similar to a circle, we just have to remember that approximation of reality is not reality, and approximation may change the perception itself of reality (if reality exists, of course).

At the moment the search feature is available with the operator *.
See the full list of Google Features here.

Update: it happened to me on february 7th 2011

Update: apparently i was not the only one concerned about it :-)

Update: but i still want an index history

small (failing predictions)

- simone
Reply

I feel small, almost nothing is going how I expected it could have gone. A year ago I would have never predicted that now I could have been in love, and so far from my work and life targets, at the same time.

Adventures in social media web life are driving me far from a respected expertise. The more I dive deep into the web, the more I feel lost and without rules to understand who’s driving and what’s the direction. Cloud computing is going big, outsourcing seems a business… while I have been always focused in learning the more technical skills I could.

Now I’m missing the swarm direction. I wake up in the city every morning and the traffic jam is shouting at my human senses, making me wish a relaxing house in the suburbs. Failing predictions about the next big moves puzzles my mind.

Sometimes mistakes have importance, you listen and try to avoid as possible. Now it’s been a while since I cannot remember even important mistakes, and this makes me feel useless, coward and with less and less to tell. dog is shit table uncle bananas. Even After the deadline plugin is failing to correct my words.

The feeling is that I need another environment to test/try my ideas in the field. Sometimes even Internet seems small.

finding information between search engines and social networks (philosophy bits)

- simone
Reply

place

where is the info stored? in a collective mind or in your friend’s mind? if you know this, you know where to start your search… but if you don’t know that… what is google doing to get to your eyes a unique place where to search for anything?

first of all google is multiplying the spaces, gmail has its own search engine, wave has its own search engine, google search do not gather info from them yet, google docs cannot search between gmail… etcetera.

is this right?

more questions: what’s special in your friend’s mind? their unique way of tagging and manipulating concepts? their life experience?

for both google has its own copies (ok ok… not identical to the real ones but man… we’re working on that). Even if we wanted a copy of our shared experiences with friends google could gather something nice, depending on our connectivity behavior .

time

it’s one of the greatest shifts between google’s on demand service and our friend’s constant streams (do we go on polling with them? or we get each single message on some kind of popup feature? (the popup feature also fits the “where” paragraph) When i’m writing facebook has the best real time feature. (update: google launches its real time search)

dispassion (neutrality)

google’s knowledge compared to our friend’s knowledge filtered by their life experience: google gives me the info to commit a perfect suicide, would a friend do the same? does google have to censor the info request if there is the proof of a bad intention?

and… when I got the info, do I still want to commit suicide? Giving the whole info could have a potential prevention ratio on bad behaviors? A search engine’s neutrality’s border is close to common people’s privacy, and privacy can be broken only at a precise user’s request or after a signed pact. Would a friend wait to see you dead before breaking into your privacy without your consent?

what?

natural language it’s just a part of the issue. do we search for info? or we search for a guide to do things? a question posted on a social network’s wall can have deep answers, just because our friends can see deeper than our first questions meanings, and they gamble a part of their involvement taking action with their words.

google is (or will be) alive. do we want him/her as a friend? do we trust/fear him/her? anyway what’s the sex of google? (lol)

half lies

our friends have ears, when we speak to them we know that it will be recorded and used somehow even against our will. google does not have ears, but every keyword typed for a search is stored and used to know more about the users. should this be more clear to people? (i mean what’s beneath that “privacy” link at the bottom of the page that only journalists and nerds read. There should be instructional flash games that must be played in order to let people know what they are using?) (update: on search engine learning)

culture

when the search engine will be able to give cross-language results? For the moment, the social network has a little solution to cultural gaps, but largely depends on the quality of each own personal network.

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