I’m doing some analysis using the public search engines and I’m being presented with a lot of pages that are not what I’m looking for. The date of publication is sometimes wrong when I search over a specific time period, or the information is weak - it takes a couple of minutes of my time to read the 2 lines of a blog in the search results, make the decision to open the page, wait for Firefox to load it properly then read enough of it to realise it’s rubbish and close the tab.
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Filed under: Research, Search, Spam by Giles Palmer
Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.
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Filed under: Quality, Search, Social Media, Spam, Technology by Giles Palmer
I hear this question quite often: how is the housing market doing? Let’s try to answer that.
First, define what precise information you want to know: whether the cost of buying (or renting) a property is going up, or down, and by how much, in a particular area (say Brighton). (more…)
Filed under: Brand Matching, Quality, Spam, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky
When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.
In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.
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Filed under: Consumer Generated Media, Customer Engagement, Quality, Search, Spam by Phil Newman
