Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for books: “What is the book about?” and “is it any good?”

Unfortunately, these questions are completely unaddressed by the information provided. To see relevant information, the user must click on each listing individually. That is, she must navigate by hand instead of by eye, and must use her memory to compare information across time instead of space.

The problem is that this graphic was designed as an index into a set of webpages, but is used as a catalog for comparing a set of books. The purpose of this graphic should not be to return a list of query matches, but to help the user learn about books related to her topic of interest.

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s how it works with hits to websites:

• a few sites become popular and form the “big head” at the left
• a few more sites form the slope
• a huge number of websites score very low and form the “long tail”

Nielsen adds these examples:

• a language has a few words (“the”, “and”, etc.) that are used extremely often, and a library has a few books that everybody wants to borrow (current bestsellers)
• a language has quite a lot of words (“dog”, “house”, etc.) that are used relatively much, and a library has a good number of books that many people want to borrow (crime novels and such)
• a language has an abundance of words (“Zipf”, “double-logarithmic”, etc.) that are almost never used, and a library has piles and piles of books that are only checked out every few years (reference manuals for Apple II word processors, etc.)

But the point here is about Google (or Yahoo, etc.) search results ranking, which puts enormous value in the number of incoming links to a page. It turns out that these links also follow a power-law distribution and it not uncommon to find complaints that Google’s Page Rank recognizes popularity over other factors.

So it’s worth wondering: is popularity bad? Are popularity and quality mutually exclusive? Do search rankings represent some sort of global group-think?

Now put this in an academic library context and consider a student Googling for background for a research paper (think University freshmen the night before it’s due). Is it possible that linking patterns work like Wikipedia and tend to favor quality, or do they simply represent lowest common denominator popularity. Do search results reflect the sum of our altruistic linking intentions or our base crudity?

More about search ranking and libraries:

• Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
• The Google Economy Vs. Libraries
• Changing Modes Of Communication
• The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.

Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

I noted this gem about why non-profits need to pay attention to their search engine placement and web traffic previously, but it’s worth noting again:

At [the National Cancer Institute], the [web development] team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

The National Cancer Institute, it turns out, was poorly ranked in many relevant searches. Though it may seem obvious now, it doesn’t matter how authoritative their information is, it has no value until it’s found. Nach: findability.

My copy has has notes scribbled in the margin and a bunch of dog-eared pages marking things I need to revisit. No, you can’t borrow it when I’m done with it, go get your own.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don’t make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:

I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health. [...] Google sent me to specialized sites such as peanutallergy.com, a shallow and grossly commercial web site pushing favored brands of nut free chocolate and soynut butter. Yahoo! and MSN didn’t perform any better. I did eventually find what I needed, but only by drawing on my advanced searching skills and familiarity with authoritive sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. If I weren’t a librarian who lives on the Web, I would have failed to find the right answers.

But don’t mistake Morville. He’s not blaming the search engines, and he’s certainly not blaming himself, for failing to find the information he needed. He’s blaming the people and organizations responsible for collecting, gathering, producing, and archiving this information.

A few pages later, he talks about some consulting he did with the National Cancer Institute. It turns out that the organization’s cancer.gov web site got top rank for a search on “cancer,” but fell off the front page when Googling specific cancers like “prostate cancer” or “mesothelioma.” Anybody who understands the Long Tail probably already suspects that searches for “cancer” are hugely outnumbered by the sum of all the searches for specific cancers, and Morville spends considerable time on that. The real question, however, is why did the cancer.gov folks miss this point? The problem is that very few people understand “findability.”

Because, like so many other design teams, they viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find what they need from the home page? It’s an important question, but it ignores the fact that many users don’t start from the home page. Powerful search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services are moving deep linking and content sampling from the exception to the rule.

At NCI, the team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

From where I sit, in a library, that means us too. As stewards of knowledge, it is our responsibility to make sure we catalog it in ways that optimize its availability and findability on the web. That means understanding the Google Economy and taking advantage of it.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely need to go order the book.

tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

tags: availability, big stick, dictum, findability, google, google economy, idea, ideas, influence, search, search results, value