Google

The Evolution Of Search For Business

~ spcoon
Haystacks (Claude Monet)
Haystacks (Claude Monet)

In 2005 we were two years deep into the Iraqi war, a year removed from Boston’s first World Series championship in 80+ years, and smack dab in the middle of the search engine gold rush.

Google had made it clear that data mining was not only a lucrative venture, but safe as well (no canaries have died to this day during database dredging operations). The rush was on to either catch up with Google’s progress (see Microsoft’s Bing) or to get out of the innovation game altogether (see Yahoo!).

Found somewhere between the turf battle of the open web search giants were hundreds of thousands of domains of wide-ranging sizes and missions that had either developed their own search engines or licensed the best available in the market. From editorial to retail sites, search was quickly becoming the focus of product teams, as the browse culture had evolved into a find culture.

Data vs Proximity

That summer, after leaving Ameritrade and still indecisive about my next move, I had flown out to A9—Amazon’s search R&D team—to present ideas about “block view” proximity in the A9 Yellow Pages interface. The context of the presentation was within a ux design interview with Udi Manber and my old Billsville pal, DeWitt Clinton, but the more I prepared back in Jersey City for a proximity UI presentation, the more my understanding of the needs of users within the context of search drew my focus elsewhere.

By the time I had left for Palo Alto, I knew I wouldn’t be a serious candidate for the job; I had fashioned a presentation around the value of structured data for retailers in a Yellow Pages experience, not proximity. This was pre-smartphones, and the ask was a desktop interface.

I ended up moving away from proximity as I skimmed through a physical Yellow Page, taking notes on my own scanning needs and findability patterns. It became clear to me that while proximity of the store from my location within the context of its own block was useful, it fell squarely in a secondary position when compared to the task of actually pinpointing a store that could serve me my specific needs.

If I’m going to get in my car and drive to a brick & mortar store, it had better have what I need to purchase.

That notion became even more self-evident when taking a spin with the existing A9 Yellow Pages interface, as inventory and/or service details weren’t exposed at the return level. Conversely, proximity was found everywhere, and while proximity might help someone find the store, and such relevance is an inherent partner in presenting search returns, it’s customer query-matching data from individual businesses that should lead this tango.

For example: the modern day Google search experience expresses this axiom in a number of ways, including:

  • a query for – [city] movies – returns an elegant display of available movies and showtimes in particular city, presenting multiple sources of aggregated reviews, a trailer, synopsis, cast list and online availability
  • a query for – [ethnic type] restaurant – returns a display featuring local restaurants that meet the type criteria, presented within the context of proximity from my current location
  • a query for – [ethnic] food menu [city] – returns a display featuring the most popular local establishment’s menu as structured data (if managed within the Google My Business environment)

search engine illustration

Google understood as early as 2006 that supporting the needs of businesses and their customers by exposing relevant data was a complex task, one that centered around data collection. So as they iterated their algorithmic approach to presenting more accurate business/customer results in their popular, revenue-driving primary search product, they began to focus on launching more structured “human-generated” data products related to business needs.

  • In 2006, Apps for Your Domain became the first attempt to harness the multitude of online needs for businesses.
  • Then came the merger of their Local Business Center—which had allowed for the collection of business-related data—with Places in 2010, creating an even more fluid experience of claiming and enriching representations of a business experience online.
  • Pages launched in 2011 (recently becoming My Business), which allowed businesses to expose their structured data, making it even more findable by potential customers, clients, partner businesses, etc. via a search query or when represented in the G+ environment.

In 2015, with the knowledge graph, graph panels and entity search in play, Google can now present a range of instantaneous, smart, semantic results to meet user queries, including those of customers looking for specifics from businesses, but they still need well-structured content to parse when an algorithmically informed guess can’t do the job.

So without relying on the market to do it on their own, their business products keep pushing the ball forward, including Google Reviews and the notion of us all being Local Guides.

Smartphones have changed search behavior over the years, and as such, proximity has claimed its own place in the search game. That said, just as I imagined when prepping for that presentation of an explicit Yellow Pages product more than a decade ago, finding the data match to a customer’s need still comes first.

Back To The Future

A decade ago the potential for interfaces to support multivariate needs in a humane fashion were just becoming understandable, let alone practical.

The reality of shipping a UI that explicitly reflected the underlying technology or database rather than the mental model of the user was beginning to wear thin. User experience began to steadily climb towards an understandable notion, on levels far beyond usability into usefulness and how it actually affects brand and the bottom line.

My presentation framed a number of explicit design principles that would optimize for usefulness in the interface. Regardless of the results of the data/proximity discussion I planned on undertaking, it was important to establish that the experience would need to be humane:

After presenting such UX axioms, I walked through the primary scenarios of the existing product. The most frustrating aspect of the customer query -> connect with business task centered around the most basic, yet complex element of search recall:

  • “coffee” in “palo alto” – returned 77 results in an interface steeped in proximity elements, such as distance from current location and a hyper-local map display
  • “coffee” and “donut” in “palo alto” – returned only 2 results, so either 75 of the previous coffee shops don’t have donuts, or the data isn’t being made available at time of query
  • “coffee” and “doughnut” in “palo alto” – returned only 1 result, and it wasn’t one of the previous two listings

There’s no kind way to tell a product team—one that has flown you clear across the country to present a vision for their interface—that no matter what we do in the interface, that the current product focus is not on point.

The toughest challenge for the Yellow Pages product wasn’t proximity, it was figuring out a way to garner a rich collections of meta-data representative of inventory for their search to parse and return. My perspective was to empower business owners to tag their services, leverage existing user reviews as metadata, and open up APIs to provide structured data for search to leverage:

  • If the business object model is a restaurant, provide an simple menu input interface on the front-end, or offer to pull in data from a popular 3rd party service
  • If the business object model is a hardware store, provide an API to connect with the domain’s inventory database
  • Etc.

Do everything you can to make it impossible for me—the customer who is searching for a specific type of wrench—to miss out on spending money at the Ma & Pa hardware store 15 minutes away that I’d rather support than a warehouse store just down the street, simply because the name of the store doesn’t have “wrench” in it.

A year after our meeting, block view and Yellow Pages were shut down by Amazon— which seemed to indicate that a focus on Amazon-available products became the priority—while Google began on a path towards creating a decentralized, modern day “Yellow Pages” product centered around business data and customer needs.

Amazon now dominates product search through its own interface, leaving proximity of brick & mortar to Google. Their shift into creating physical products such as Kindle & Echo while launching their own original entertainment studio for delivery on Prime, marks a wicked understanding of market opportunities and innovation.

And the band plays on.

Lawrence Lessig On Google Book Search

Video ~ ~ spcoon

larry-lessig

The presentation is close to 30 minutes long, but if you have any interest in the future of our society through the lens of culture, knowledge, creativity, politics, hell, if you have any interest in being an informed and participating citizen with this world, grab some chips and a brew, get comfortable and digest this presentation.

IP-extremism… so true.

(via Lessig Blog)

Web 2.0: The Micro And Macro Of The Matter

~ spcoon

web2

In this post, I want to pull back a bit to focus on some of the meaning behind the term Web 2.0, touching upon aspects of the meme that have driven it to a certain tipping point within the tech community. And no, that doesn’t mean everyone is on board—as dedicated professionals are either embracing the moniker or slapping it down as a marketing gimmick—but one can’t deny the lexicon has begun to reach the mainstream business world.

The Way We Were

Each year, over the past 10 years or so, the internet has progressively behaved less like a mass of disparate domains—hooked into each other via simple hyperlinks—and more like a functioning network. If you can’t remember 10 years back, 1996 was practically the McCarthy era of the web. There was a good chance you’d be sued if your web site linked to a corporate site without permission.

Seriously.

The behavior of the web as a macro entity wasn’t very smart as well. It essentially stagnated as an enabler for people (including developers) to interact (publish, reuse, etc.) with individual sites. The two-way web was there on paper, but an infrastructure forged across a critical mass of domains had yet to be accomplished.

Then along came Amazon, blowing the roof off of e-commerce by implementing collaborative filtering. Skip over a few other ingenious domains and Google completely changed the definition of information retrieval within both its own domain and others. The IQ of the web jumped as its big players became smarter, but across a majority of domains, the web was still more of a parking garage for individual vehicles, with individual owners and drivers. Carpooling hadn’t begun yet.

The Definition Of A Smart Web

Take my home office network as an example. Each day I easily share data between three machines in order to accomplish a multitude of different goals and a subset of numerous tasks. If I’m using my PC and want to alter an image found on my PowerBook, I simply use Photoshop on my PC to grab the data from across the network, manipulate the image and save it back to its original location. I perform similar operations when marking up HTML and CSS on my PowerBook, then hopping on a browser on my PC to view the data in a rendered form.

This is my personal realm of shared data; a collaborative, transparent, usable space called a network. It stitches together my various personal computers, allowing my software to access data openly and freely. The label isn’t fancy, because the concept is finite and comprehensible. I own everything, from the hardware to the software to the authentications allowing access throughout. I am the network.

I Am Not The Web… Yet

A transition to a user-centered web will only occur once we, the web development community, take the well established premise of a finite network and extrapolate its underlying philosophies of connectivity, transparency and usefulness across a potentially unlimited amount of “networked” domains—each with varying business objectives and often at best, a subjective understanding of user goals and tasks.

In doing so, the rationale for the 2.0 label will start to become clear, as we’re dealing with an enormous number of variables in an extremely large value equation.

We’re living in an entrepreneur’s dream world.

Web 2.0 is a useful moniker to latch onto. Without a set of guiding principles, progressive domains that eat, sleep and breath collaborative, transparent and useful user experiences might end up functioning within a bubble, as opposed to influencing the adoption of industry-wide hooks of shared data and patterns. Just as Amazon and Google previously raised the bar in the late 90’s and challenged their competition to innovate or fold, this philosophical approach is a rallying cry for the entire industry.

The Micro/Macro Example

I’m going to stick with my current favorite example from around the web. A subset of interface features on flickr reads like this:

Each of these features within the flickr domain could be studied to find analogous patterns from the macro arena around the web (e.g. posting images is the equivalent to publishing a podcast), but by focusing on one feature, user commenting, we can blow out the possibilities for usefulness across a Web 2.0 environment.

While commenting isn’t unique per se, flickr does provide a commenting feature that is very useful. In order to help a user keep up with discourse surrounding their posts, flickr provides a “Recent Activity” screen, which not only presents user comments in context to the images, but notifies you when your image was added as someone else’s favorite. There’s also an elegantly designed page which documents the history of comments that you’ve made across the domain. flickr makes this so easy to track, they even provide an RSS feed for peripheral awareness.

commenting

Now take this concept from the micro space of flickr and extrapolate it across the macro space of the web and you have the means to track numerous conversations you’ve either started or joined over n period of time. Blogpulse has a similar interface with its Conversation Tracker, but that relates more to trackbacks and the movement of a topical conversation across posts. Interesting, but not personally interesting.

The captivating aspect of the localized, recent activity screen from flickr is through the exposure of an involved conversation, rather than an uninvolved and evolving perspective.

When flickr was without the recent activity feature, I was never able to remember what images I previously commented on, so in turn, my participation level was reduced. With the feature, I comment much more often, as the connection between me and other people’s information objects is now tangible.

Now, apply that same concept to the web. What would a recent activity interface centered on your comments from around the web do for your continued contribution to public discourse?

This is only one idea for how the concepts behind the Web 2.0 meme can change the way we look at the web, moving from a centralized group of branded domains to a functional network of decentralized, shared data, information and applications.

What are some of your ideas?

Tag! We’re it!

~ spcoon

Alright, I admit it—I didn’t get out (or online) much while I worked for Ameritrade. 60 hour work weeks for two straight years while building a design practice and a forward-thinking trading platform will do that to your peripheral vision. Well, I’m making up for lost time, slowing down to explore the web… big time.

The IA in me is smiling. No, not for the sheer joy of seeing community indexing, the IA in me is smiling because it’s becoming clear to me where the web is heading, and it’s not following a topical, structured, media-filtered path.

Take Technorati for example; the approach is like a Bizarro perspective of the mainstream media.

bizzaro

Technorati isn’t dumb, ugly, inhumane or bizarro as a nemesis dimension in a comic book, but they are backwards in their approach to presenting a political/news media lens of corporate America… in a very good way.

The mainstream media presents the news by using explicit filters to ensure that what is published or broadcasted supports the primary objectives of capitalism. In the past, I’ve ranted about the much needed expansion of the Google and Yahoo! news model to place blogs into the mix when drawing from indexed sources. Well, Technorati flipped the model entirely with a communal approach to exposing and digesting information. There are no “vanilla” labels of a topical navigation, splitting the world into simplified categories and driving a pre-conceived notion of “valuable” content (i.e. politics, business, sports, etc.) into the skulls of society.

Technorati leverages tagging to present information based on our desires.

Run a tag search on “free speech” and you get a descriptive page of the latest blog entries, flickr images and a contextual list of social bookmarks which include mainstream media articles (based on del.icio.us and Furl tagging). It took me a few returns to stumble upon the revolutionary aspect of this approach. I mean, three months ago, I would’ve been happy if Google News simply added a column of contextual links of blog post that corresponded to a search query. Technorati has flipped the script and featured bloggers, reducing the media to a column of “see also’s.”

This is how you build community. I love it.

So where can this go? Can this approach sustain a movement towards fundamentally altering how American society exposes and digests information? Man, “it depends” is such an understatement.

  • If Technorati can reach a tipping point, similar to Google a few years back, and devise a marketing campaign, where, say, Tony Soprano is shown “Technorating” waste management on his computer, the impact on society could be huge. People will start to look for information from other people (sans an editorial slant), which flips the trust and credibility model
  • If Technorati partners with a Google to provide user-generated content within their results pages, society will begin to experience contextual alternatives to mainstream reporting, entertainment, et al without being forced to have to go search for it through RSS and other technical means.
  • If Technorati is bought by a Google, all bets are off. Only time would tell if Chomsky’s “propaganda model” proves itself to be a truism or if new media and its superstars are exceptions to the rule.

It’s obvious that the web’s semantic synapses are continuing to form. This is only the beginning.