The Challenge For Search

“By the end of 1992 there were only 50 web-sites in the World and a year later the number was still no more than 150. … In 1994 there were 3,2 mln hosts and 3,000 web-sites. Twelve months later the number of hosts had doubled and the number of web-sites had climbed to 25,000.” (Griffiths, 2002)

In this way, internet historian Richard Griffiths accounts the explosive growth of the web from 1994 onward with the development of the first popular graphical browser, Mosaic. Mosaic was created by Netscape-founder Marc Andreessen, who went on to other projects after the browser wars. In recent times he’s begun writing a terrific blog on entrepreneurship, and he has co-founded and funded social networks service provider NING, a project and company we’ll keep a close eye on and get back to later, as NING opens up vast new opportunities for niche communities.

I recently wrote about attributing value to the context of finding information, rather than on any particular piece of information (which is what copyright is based on). One type of company and services, which so far has been very good at attributing value to the context of finding information, is search engines. Search engines have so far provided great ease and comfort of obtaining information online, which have given them a prominent position on the web.

What search engines has so far been able to deliver, however, they’ll find increasingly more difficult, as the amount of accessible information increase. Here’s what search engines has to deal with :

Total Sites Across All Domains August 1995 – December 2007.

Netcraft is a well-respected British internet company which among other things performs regular web server surveys. One of the nice side results of this work is a pretty decent idea of how many websites there really are in the world.

‘In the December 2007 survey’, Netcraft reports, ‘we received responses from 155,230,051 sites. This is an increase of 5.4 million sites since last month, continuing the very strong growth seen during this year; the web has grown by nearly 50 million sites since December 2006.’ The curve of the ‘active sites’, excluding Blogger sites and MySpace accounts, shows an even more solid exponential tendency. This kind of growth in accessible information on the internet spells huge challenges for search engines, which already now shows, especially if you do ‘weak’ searches on little known subjects.

If, for example, you do a search for the girl name ‘Britney’ on Google, 9 out of 10 results relates to the popsinger Britney Spears. This relates to what we may term the mainstream problem, which is basically the problem of a hit-driven industrial economy : limited shelf space. Google can display only a limited number of results on the first page (10 results as standard). The more interesting Britneys down the search results may hide the one page you’re looking for, but you won’t find it with any ease and comfort. But let’s say, which is not unreasonable, that this girl’s name is the one piece of information, you’re in possession of, before you search for something a Britney did or someone named Britney (but not Spears). If one has to browse 17 pages of search results before finding their particular piece of information (as is not rarely the case if you often look for obscure information online), one real quickly loses one’s patience with “search” as an effective means of finding information online.

Thus, you have a great market for social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and to some extent, Wikipedia and other great collaborative databases of ‘further information’. Kaplak will add to this pallet of services, by attributing value to the context of finding information. This happens when a producer consciously designates a percentage of his price in Kaplak to pay for the context, in which his product is sold.

Tags : browser, Google, Marc Andreessen, mosaic, netcraft, search, understand premises 

Timeline

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