Through The Looking Glass Of Web 2 0

Until I tried it, the whole 2.0 thing seemed like a joke to me. But the switch between the Google, Yahoo, MSN search engine Web 1.0 war and the environment of Web 2.0 is drastic.

For those of you who remember using a card catalog at the public library, the change is similar to the one you experienced using a computer to find a book for the first time. No endless cabinets of cards to hunt through. No misplaced cards that meant you wouldn’t find the book you were looking for that day. Every book in the library accessible from one keyboard.

In 2.0, knowledge is fast. It moves at the speed of the keyboard and web form. A story from New York hits the West Coast in the time it takes a web page to refresh. And when a network build on speed puts a premium on those sites and bloggers that can get information first, news hits even the gardening forums before it even reaches the cable news networks.

This is drastic transition in the evolution of the speed of knowledge. With the invention of the printing press by Johann Guttenberg in 1440, the rate at which knowledge spread become quicker. Word of mouth was no longer the only way to receive news. Afterwards came mail, newspapers, television, and 24 hour cable news. Each a leap forward from the past form of media.

Then came the internet. Within a few short years, knowledge was accessible from everywhere with a few clicks of the mouse. We can now store more information on our hard drives than we can find at the local library.

Now, with web 2.0, the filter and wait time of search engines is taken out. Some might say that this cuts down on accuracy, but with time, I think it will improve accuracy. Search engines try to guesstimate what searchers want by applying an algorithm to what they type in the form. With the new animal, people are the algorithms.

When I started building my library of musical tastes, I usually discovered new music through people that listened to the same type of music I listened to. If we both listened to Pink Floyd than I might take the chance and listen to some other music they suggested to me. This is a much more effective way to find new information than with an algorithm. Let people be your algorithm. Let links be distributed through the lateral route of tastes, themes, and interests rather than the direct route of search engines that require a user to know almost exactly what they want to find before they search.

There is also a time element involved. Some search engine results are just old. They aren’t what you are looking for. Some engines literally make sure links are aged before they are given the status they deserve.

In 2.0, a hour is a long time and a month is a lifetime. When searching through tagged sites or feeds, a site may gain 100 links to it in an hour by taggers. A traditional search engine can’t keep up with this. This type of link growth would have to be run through filters to check for spam or other tactics to artificially increase it’s rank. And still, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water a multitude of times.

Traditional search engines base all of their ranking systems on the votes of people who know how to build websites or at least post to forums. This is not very balanced. Sitting at the computer screen, you can assume all you want, but step out in the real world and just try to talk to anyone about HTML. Then you realize these are unheard internet votes.

Tagging and other web 2.0 technologies have brought a little more balanced to the system, giving those, whose tech savvy stops at bidding on Ebay, the internet right to vote. And when I finally got the chance to check it out by spending the last few weeks in the stream of web 2.0, I realized my whole vision was a little short sided. Sitting in box, typing code all day can skew your version of the world. Judging the needs of an internet audience by the whims of an algorithmic internet program can skew this vision even more.

Web 1.0 is Plato’s cave, only shadows of the true internet traffic flow. As Web 2.0 technologies become more mainstream, the traditional search engine will have to adapt to a more democratic union between “internet land owners” and those who only surf but probably make up a greater part of internet users.