Blogger, Google, Memex

My new piece in Slate is a commentary on the Blogger/Google deal, but it's probably better seen as the latest installment in a near-decade-long quest that I've been on (at FEED, in various talks I've given, and in my first book) to demonstrate the ways in which the Web still doesn't measure up to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex. Here's the gist:

Up to now, Google's services have revolved entirely around organizing and packaging the Web so that you can better find information--whether in the form of its flagship search tool, or the Google News service, or its online shopping experiment, Froogle. But Google has not yet ventured into managing the information and surfing history of individual users. If Google went in this direction with the Blogger acquisition, it would hearken back to one of the seminal documents of the computing age: Vannevar Bush's 1946 " As We May Think " essay, which envisioned a new tool to augment human memory.... In one crucial respect, Bush's vision differed from today's Web: He placed great importance on the trails created as the user moved through information space, assuming that a record of those trails would be of great use in amplifying the signal of human memory... I've now spent the past eight years exploring the Web practically every day, and over that time I've probably stumbled across thousands of documents that were worth preserving, yet the tools I have for organizing that history are minimal at best. Bookmarks are helpful if you're tracking a dozen sites, but beyond useless if you're managing 10,000. If Google can organize the entire Web with such efficacy, imagine what it could do with a much smaller subset of documents.

Props to the always insightful Matt Webb for making the first Google/Memex connection shortly after the deal was announced.

Updated: March 7, 10:50 AM: Ted Weinstein's post in response to this article made me realize that I should have been clearer about one thing: I don't think that this should be Google's default strategy for everyone using their service. That would raise legitimate privacy concerns and be wildly resource intensive on their end. It should be an opt-in product, and maybe even one you have to pay for.

Comments

[Anon]

You might find this interesting:

Personalized search (2002). James Pitkow, Hinrich Schütze, Todd Cass, Rob Cooley, Don Turnbull, Andy Edmonds, Eytan Adar, Thomas Breuel. Communications of the ACM, 45(9). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/567498.567526

The assets of the PARC spinoff from which this technology was developed was acquired by Google.

[bob]

cool application for the new joint effort. i think Google is probably learning a lot about its possibilities from the free advice on the net right now.

i went to a talk by Eric Schmidt (google's CEO) today and his sole comment on the merger was "we hope to help them out." his point of view was just that his tool (Google) would be more useful if the content it searched (the rest of the net, including weblogs) was better. what a nice guy (and company).

[Ted Weinstein]

Steve -

Yes, it would be great if Google would offer the ability for me to search for results only on pages I have already visited. But they always had this capability via the cookie they (try to) place.

The issues keeping them from implementing such functionality already have probably been:
1 - competition to existing portals/customers (although they are obviously evolving to compete with their current portal customers in many other ways)
2 - data storage burden (keeping the database of every Google users's surfing behavior would require massive amounts of storage)
3 - privacy issues, as well as vulnerability to governmental demands that they release data on individual users' surfing habits in many legal situations.

But to get back to my original point: didn't Google already have the TECHNICAL capability to offer personalized Web indexes before they bought Blogger?

/Ted

[Rikard Linde]

I made a mockup for something similar a couple of years ago. Check it out if you're interested.

Hmm... my intention was not to make this sound like a besserwisser comment but somehow it did.
Anyway, it's an idea that deserves to be implemented.

Rikard

[elaine]

if you haven't read it already, you might want to take a look at Cory Doctorow's article on O'Reilly...

My Blog, My Outboard Brain
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html

[Ernie Schell]

Even though it doesn't track page visits automatically, BackFlip offers a good bit of the functionality you are talking about. I'd be interested in your opinion of what BackFlip does (www.backflip.com).

[Dave Seidel]

Sorry, I think your article is based on a faulty premise. See my weblog for a (slightly) more extensive comment: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100130/2003/03/07.html#a159

[Rainson]

Steve,

Read your Emerging Technology April 2003 on how e-mails can help identify a karass. Really enjoyed it.

Thanks,
Ron

[Rikard Linde]

Actually, if I had used this tool before writing the last post I would have known that the mockup was created last year and not "a few years ago". So at least one person will become less ignorant if they make a tool like this:-)

[Rikard Linde]

Oh and thanks for the interesting read Steven. There aren't many people writing about this aspect of network technology in such a clear and "user-friendly" way. Thank you.

[Gene]

What you described in the Slate article sounds a lot like the history file kept by your browser.

Apologies for the self-link, but I've posted some additional commentary: http://www.atomiq.org/archives/000553.html

Cheers,

Gene

[Honymann]

In my opinion this deal is not about improving search results or helping anybody out. It is simply about broadening the base for Google Adwords and improving the way to match ads with appropriate content. If Google is successful in that this would potentially help many content based business models to become financially viable again.

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