Last week, my wife and I went to an electrical goods store to buy an electrical toothbrush for her.
Easy task – I thought!
The moment we walked into the shop a nice guy asked if we needed help.
- “Yes” – we said – “We need an electrical toothbrush”.
- “Do you want it rechargeable or not, pulsating or oscillating, with or without a microchip, with one or many brush modes, bla, bla”
And right there he lost me. For a minute I wondered whether it was me or had the world changed? Bloody heck, I just wanted a toothbrush for my wife!
I felt frustrated that I couldn’t just simply buy a toothbrush.
Now let’s imagine all the options available on the Internet today.
Before the Internet boom, information was a relatively valuable asset available via just a few media choices (TV, Radio and Print).
With 30 minutes a day you’d be able to collect the most important information and feel comfortable that your peers would be at the same level as you.
Over time more options started showing up (forums, portals, blogs, videologs, podcasts, social networking, etc).
Now, collecting information is a complex process where users need to invest long time and energy probably causing anxiety.
Barry Schwartz in his book, “The Paradox of choice” says:
“When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice is no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize.”
Tyrannize?
Lack of choices is bad, few choices is good, but is more choices better?
Let’s think of a young webdesigner who wants to learn about SEO and SEM.
He goes to Google (isn’t Google the paradox of few choices?) and simply type SEO.
He will be presented with more than 270,000,000 pages!
Is it alleviation or frustration?
So, he decides to follow a blog and google “Seo” on Google-blogs,
Uau! more than 6 million pages.
“Where do I start?”-He might think.
Do you think that sort of result will encourage users to participate more in communities or will it dissuade them?
Choosing well is difficult nowadays and a wrong choice may make us suffer.
(End of part1)
Lucio Ribeiro
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is why it’s so important for search engines to address not only the ranking issue but also the query issue.
Personalisation addresses both of those I think, because of query repair and then the collecting of info on the user.
Providing natural language search allows for more precise information to be captured, and allows actual communication between the engine (who has the resource in there somewhere) and the user, who isn’t sure how to get it.
As someone who has worked in IR and natural language machines, I think the job is to give the user information that s/he requested, and information that might actually be closer to what s/he wanted but s/he didn’t know.
That way we’re giving the user the information and doing away with all the other resources which basically all say the same thing. We also give the option of straying from the original query to get a more helpful resource.
Finding authority sources and using them as a start point is what any human would do after all.
Either way at the end of the day: garbage in, garbage out. If we work with the query to start with, it might bring down the number of results significantly.
CJ, this is a great analyzes
“I think the job is to give the user information that s/he requested, and information that might actually be closer to what s/he wanted but s/he didn’t know”
Thats the paradox, when we start looking for the information we just have back on our minds a first degree need. When we are presented with more options then we were even expecting thats where the anxiety takes place.
Do i have to choose? Yes – Thats where everything gets screw up.
On this case we can imagine SEO being a good karma job – all the SEO professionals are taking away this job from the users and doing the “choice” process little bit easier.
Cheers
Lucio
I really love that we do a “good karma job” :)