The Search Economy and the Tower of Babel by John C. Dvorak

The Search Economy and the Tower of Babel

Shared via AddThis

My comments on the article:

The Internet is a sea of digital dog-doo with a few islands of reasonably authoritative content. That will be where most people crowd onto, those islands of reliable information. If I were Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc, I would be developing algorithms to determine the characteristics of an authoritative site. There would be protections in the form of site audits that check to make sure spam and junk don't leak in.

Authoritative information has a lot of value attached to it, so maybe the content is not just sitting in indexable web pages but stored in a server. That is where RDF (Resource Description Framework) abstracts would be very useful, providing search engines enough information to index with some affiliated rich content that RDF provides for. If you wanted the full rundown, then you could click through and the site would generate the full content.

I don't see any other alternative. I might still want to do a free-flung search for fun, but if I want definitive data, I want to have a check-box that says "Authoritative Search?" that only searches "authoritative" sites per their definition.

"Let the Searcher Beware" is always the first rule of thumb. But I should have a choice of where I want to search if I want to have confidence in the results.