If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In an age of information abundance, internet users are often overwhelmed by an overload of available data. CIO Insight’s recent ‘Infomanagement Special’ addition included on its cover the following, “The Information Paradox: So much data, so little value. What’s the cure?”. In a sense this refrences not only the findability of information, but the overall value of what you can find. There are several faults in the way we find, retrieve, and store information.

There are a number of search engines, networks, lists, etc where you can find information. Often times your results are an overabundance of information with little value or authority in the topic you are looking for. A main problem for this is human input — these services have to guess what you mean. Although commercial services, like Amazon and Netflix, help you find information by recommending products to you based on your habits. This limits human input which allows for greater specificity in results.

Information retrieval is another part of the process that deters information findability. The nature of retrieval has, since the advent of the web, been generally a pull system. I have to input text into google, press a button, and retrieve results. RSS is changing the information is being syndicated, creating a push architecture but has yet solved the findability problem. Pushing data does not ensure its value, as you can tell by blog posts in rss that you aren’t interested in; netflix movies are recommended that you have absolutely no desire to see; and amazon often recommends me products as if I am a different person.

Okay, so now you have performed your search using the best combination of google search hacks, and you have waded through thousands of results to find that one that gave you value. Now, try to find it again. How many times have you searched for the same thing on google? Sure, you can bookmark it or tag it in delicious but will that help you find it the next time you are looking for it? It will narrow the subset of results but will still be hard to retrieve. I want to be delivered that information when I want / need to use it. Maybe you could just tell me what I clicked on the next time I search for that? Or, could you send me an RSS feed containing a link for every page I clicked on or saved when performing a search? Or better yet — constantly deliver me relavent material based on my search patterns.

Ask.com is doing great things with the re-retrieval of data in search results. I was pleased to find out you do not need an account to use their save feature. You can save results from queries for future reference. You can organize your saved results in folders as well as tagging them. It also tells you the query you used to find that result. And, you can sort/search by the date it was added. But it doesn’t display my saved results when I perform a saved search again, nor does it tell me what results I have saved, thus allowing me to save a duplicate result. They have also made it difficult to find my saved results, only displaying it after having saved a result (in this example, a duplicate). There’s plent of whitespace on ask.com’s home page. Give me a grid, list or button when I get there.

Other services do a good job of delivery like gada.be. You can get numerous RSS feeds from various sources with a single query. The problem with the service is the abundance of invaluable information delivered to your inbox. I would also like to see an aggregate result set with the most relevant results from the multiple services it queries.

Next generation search engines need to figure out how to alleviate the finding, retrieving, and storing headaches in an era of information overload. I don’t wan’t carry-out, do you deliver?

technorati tags:search, informationoverload, internet, findability

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Get GetANewBrowser delivered to your inbox