We have lots of ways of doing that, tracking the keywords, owner of the blog, signature at the end of the page. Yet what surprises me is that the information is not displayed in a search result page.
It would be nice if we could see the author, have a way to review other articles from that author ordered by relevance to your current search. If you could use something similar to the Social Graph API to access other resources by that author. Obviously you probably want to limit those to the ones the author is comfortable exposing as public web sites (if there is such a thing as a private one still). I suppose you would also want to have references to web site the author contributes to without necessarily owning the sites.
Of course we all know how evil Google is, it is tracking so much information about us without telling us about it. That data is used to know who you are, what you are interested in and use that information to narrow your search result items to what might be more relevant to you. I believe the problem lies in the fact that this information is hidden from you and that there is little you can do to influence how the data is being used. I know you can view the history and you can remove items but there is a difference between removing a history item and deciding not to use it for future searches. If users could truly own their data and influence its content, I believe the privacy issue would be less of a problem. Nobody wants a system that gathers data about you, to help you of course, but does not expose how that data is used and barely exposes what the data is. When you make a search, I want to have an explain option where I will be able to see how my previous searches/wanderings have influenced the results for this page. It would be especially important then to have the option of saying don't use that one, this is not me really. Then I might be ok to have the information used to also deliver some targeted material. I need to know what the benefits to me are before I feel comfortable it being used by someone else. This does not mean Google needs to expose the algorithm used to deliver the results, only how my information is influencing the results presented to me.
Let's say the user now has a way to set those preferences, we could take the approach a step further. I would want to use something similar to Stumble Upon where I can rate authors and articles in the context of my original search. This would allow dynamically adding more intelligence about the document itself but also customize my search results based on previously approved authors and articles. On the top of that you can then cross reference results and ranking from other users 'similar to you' or from other previous 'similar' searches and maybe give more relevant results. Probably something not too far of the Stumble Upon toolbar which can rate the results based on your preferences.
For the more advanced user, you can start adding a social aspect to this and add the ability to register some of your friends and when you look for something your friends already found, you could have some additional information equivalent to your friends' recommendations. But by then that is probably a little complicated and too cumbersome to really be useful. I might have people I trust in my circles, but I probably do not trust them in all aspects of my interests. If we have to think that much before deciding how to influence my searches, no-one will go through the effort.
So to summarize:
- Start displaying the authors of the information and give access to their work
- Show the user how the data gathered influences the search results
- Allow the user to enter preferences for sources of information
- Ignore everything else I added
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3 comments:
This may have escaped you as a French person, but first you have to tell them how to make money using your suggestions. :-)
Jim
Well, if I understand the model right, Google benefit from increased traffic and they have to keep improving the efficiency and attraction of the search engine just to keep their share of the market. That should be good reason enough. Increased traffic, increased click on sponsored results and all. There is always the possibility of not just sponsoring products anymore but also sponsoring yourself as well.
If all that is not good enough, I believe Google has lots of initiatives that are only about getting more information to the public, the rest will sort itself out (meaning someone else will find a way to market it).
You are not alone:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/003575.php
Jim
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