Information R/evolution

Posted October 16th 2007 @ 11:12 pm by Kathryn Greenhill

Discuss.

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3 Comments

Peta Hopkins
October 17, 2007 at 07:53

It makes me wonder why Google bothers to keep telling us how many zillions of records it has found for our searches (at least to that many places - just round it off to the nearest million I say). I never pay any attention to that number as I know I’m only interested in the first 2-3 pages (and that’s more than most people) and I know that the one I really need might be buried on page 1050 of results. It just highlights how much dross there is (in the context of a particular search - I know, one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure), plus how little chance we’ve got of really finding the perfect information source.

I think the need for order and findability might be coded into the human brain and that’s why sites like Delicious may actually end up being the search site of choice, because at least some human being actually thought the site was good enough to bother bookmarking it.

Today I’m going to try using Delicious as my search engine of first resort.

Maybe Delicious is to Yahoo as Wikipedia is to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Kathryn Greenhill
October 17, 2007 at 08:49

I didn’t think about del.icio.us as a search engine when I posted this, but it’s a really interesting idea. We’re doing Social Tagging for 23 Things next week, and one of the exercises I’m getting people to do is compare a del.icio.us search to one on google, zuula, dogpile and kartoo.

I’d thought it up months ago, but it wasn’t until your comment that I realised quite how neatly it dovetailed with this vid.

BTW - people who serve students of any kind should watch this video made by the same people. It’s about what students are doing with their time - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

Neerav
October 19, 2007 at 11:07

Very thought provoking. Thanks for bringing it up Kathryn

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