Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm on this panel, so can only do spotty blogging.

Eszter Hargittai, the moderator, shows a video of users go wrong with links. E.g., confusing sponsored links with what they're actually looking for.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet talks about a survey they couldn't do because it was too hard to figure out the purpose of a search, the credibility and origination of a link, the meaning of a link, etc. Instead he talks about four conclusions from various research. 1. People start as a skeptics when they start looking for links. If people know it's commercial info, they become more suspicious. 2. People can be fooled. They can get lost. They can trust the wrong info. 82% of search users couldn't always tell which results are paid and which aren't. 3. Despite those problems, 87% of general search users say they find info most of the time. They are most successful finding commercial info, and least successful in finding political info. 4. When people are confused in a search, they ping their networks. They use links to start conversations.

Peter Morville ("Ambient Findability") explains how he got here. He started out as a librarian. He read a paper by Marcia Bates and realized that queries are interactive and iterative: the query changes as our search continues. He became an information architect. (In fact, he's one of the founders of the field.) How do you enable people to move between searching and browsing modes. As a librarian, he thought he could organize systems to help people find things. But usability testing showed the power of words, which then can be hyperlinks that jump people out of the browsable structure. Besides usability, there's also desirability, credibility and accessibility. "Ambient findability" means being able to find anything from anyone, anywhere at any time.

I say (briefly) that links are little acts of generosity, which means the architecture of the Web is fundamentally moral, i.e., every link recognizes that there are other people who matter. [I'm paraphrasing.]

Seth Finkelstein points out that Google measures popularity and that not all is sweetness and light. Popularity does not distinguish between the famous and infamous, knowledge and crackpot, hateful ideas. Popular results become more popular precisely because it shows up more in the search sites. And most people don't go past the first few returns. "When you type a search into a search engine, there's a lot of social politics involved in the search," and this, Seth says, needs to be discussed.