What Will Supersede PageRank?

Today we live in a world ruled by PageRank. Every web page has its specific rank that says whether it is valuable to the internet community or not. There is however one problem. There is nothing like a “universal” internet community per se. There are just people with different priorities, interests, expectations.

Although PageRank was a big success of its days (being able to distinguish between valuable content and the “mess” of the web), more and more people understands that the “majority” approach, that fits well with broadcasting media, is not suitable for the internet, which is by its nature an interactive medium, able to personally identify its users.

“I don’t want to only see the stories that most people are interested in, I want interesting stories.” (Dave’s Wordpress Blog)

OK, this is a reasonable expectation. But, how to move on? By replacing an “universal” PageRank with an “personalized” one?

A “personalized” PageRank

Page Rank is a brilliant piece of thinking. It was able to make use of the only semantic information that is embedded in the web syntax (the links) to evaluate quality of pages. By processing statistics of links we can understand which pages are most linked to, and this in fact allows us to access the vast amount of work of people who already read and evaluated these pages and created links to those they considered valuable.

But the links are already “milked to death” and there is nothing other in the web syntax that would give us an additional clue to quality of web content. So any attempt to move forward with the quality of web search would require introducing some new piece of syntax to the web, or, put it simply, something that would make the web content more structured. Yes, it is a tremendous task, but not impossible. And in fact, it is already happening.

Towards a more structured web

There are two possible approaches to adding more structure to the web:

1. Growing popularity and thus mass penetration of structured applications, like social networks.
2. Introducing a new piece to the web’s syntax, that would be seamlessly integrated to the existing web. My candidate: the Unique Personal Identificator (UPI).

These are quite different approaches; while the first one is based on mass adoption of structured applications, the second one is based on adoption of simple additional syntax by users. Let’s start with the first one for now.

Social network as a search engine

Social network is in fact an application that consists of

• a specialized web search engine coupled with
• a specialized web hosting service.

This approach has a clear motivation: the specialized search engine greatly benefits from being able to work with upfront defined structured information. So, for example, if we assume that the name is always filled in a field called “name”, company name in the appropriate field “company” (and is in addition related to the unique ticker symbol), education degree and country are selected from a pre-filled list etc., we are able to provide far better and far more relevant search results for our predefined queries than any full-text based approach can. So we are just porting the old good theory from traditional database systems to the internet. Ideally, the entire web should be structured this way!

Growing popularity of social networks

But now the interesting piece comes. The web is in fact becoming more structured, thanks to these applications. Because the search in social networks really works (well, structured search worked in traditional databases since 60’s, so why not here), these applications become useful and thus popular. The biggest social networks today contain tens of million of users and put profiles of these users on the web. Thanks to this development, a significant piece of the internet content is becoming structured in a very formal, traditional “database way”. We can even say that the web is becoming a more organized place.

Wider consequences of social networks

So there are now millions of users on the web, who took the time to create their personalized and structured profiles, and who keep these structured profiles updated. This is an amount of work that cannot be overlooked. In fact, it could already be compared (at least to certain extent) to the effort, which web users invested into linking their pages. This growing piece of structured web content will serve as a special (and welcomed!) input to universal web search engines. It can greatly improve their search capabilities in the areas where applications like social networks force people to use “strict syntax”.

Vision

This in fact doesn’t mean anything else than introduction of new syntax rules to certain application areas of the web. It is fair to expect that there will be more and more applications like social networks over the time. All these applications will have one thing in common: they all will motivate users to use the internet in a predefined, highly structured way. Whether this will result in structured personal profiles, product descriptions, descriptions of calendar events, or others, all this information will turn the internet to a more structured base of data. The amount of structured content on the internet will grow and will become a goldmine for any search engine of the future. As a result, traditional full text based web search will be complemented by more efficient tools in all areas where possible. Thank to this development, search will certainly improve. But for a really significant improvement, we should dethrone PageRank from its role of a sole and universal expert for evaluating information relevance.

PageRank Replacement?

To do this, we should implement a shift from evaluating pages to evaluating users. This would be a true revolution in the web search allowing us to search personally relevant information.

However, as we already said, this would require introducing a new piece to syntax to the entire web. Very difficult concept, indeed! Could we find out a method how to persuade users and developers to adopt this new piece of web syntax? Let us think about it next time.

Live.com - too deep innovation

There is lot of areas where we should innovate the web search, except of one – user interface. It was Google’s big contribution to the internet community to go the simplest way. No flashing banners, no “sexy” layouts. Just a very intuitive text list. And a page navigation that uses our own browser functions. What could be nicer and more practical?

And now have a look at live.com. Its search results are displayed in a fancy window and end some 5cm above the bottom of page. You intuitively need to scroll – but oops! No scrollbar is there. Just two strange and almost invisible (because made in light grey on white background) arrows. Should we move them? Click on them? Click on the bar?

This is not the way to go. As Microsoft Monitor blog puts it: “I see the new doohickeys--slider and macros--as adding complexity without significantly improving search relevancy.”

Microsoft uses the extra white space under the search results for a message Help us improve. Interesting enough – if they really improve in this matter (and focus their innovation efforts to the right areas) the place for this message disappears automatically...

What is Missing In the Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard Concept?

Let me say a few words to the new initiative of Ray Ozzie, who proposes the universal clipboard for the internet. I would like to show a slightly wider approach that could be better positioned for a mass adoption because - in my opinion - it better corresponds with the nature of today's internet applications and user’s expectations.

Ray Ozzie’s Concept

Ray envisions a standard for interchanging structured information between web applications (e.g. web calendars and address books) and calls it an “extension of the clipboard user model to the web”.

Quote:

And what was the most fundamental technology enabling “mash-ups” of desktop applications?

The clipboard. And a set of common clipboard data formats.

Before the clipboard, individual applications (such as Lotus 1-2-3 with its Copy and Move operations) enabled intra-application data transfer – in a world largely designed around a single running application. But the advent of the multi-application user environment, combined with the simplicity of the Select/Cut/Copy/Paste/Clear model, suddenly empowered the user in ways they hadn’t previously experienced.

Reading these lines, no doubt the concept and its reasoning sounds interesting. But when I had a look at the screencast of a Live Clipboard demo, a big question emerged in my head. Will the Live Clipboard really succeed? Is this the right application for the internet world?

I don’t think so. The user’s perspective changed significantly since late 80’s and 90’. These days, people expect more from internet applications than they expected from PC with Windows. They would like a real automation, not just a tool for manually moving (even complex) data.

And this is why I think developers will not be too excited to implement this concept – it will not bring any real competitive advantage to their products.

Why the Clipboard Was Adopted

Now more from the developers’ view. Back in 1985, when Windows 1.0 first appeared on the market, the battle was not about pushing the clipboard; it was of course about pushing Windows and reach its wide adoption by developers. Clipboard was just one (and certainly not the most important one) "selling point" of Windows (the really important selling points were: GUI, ability to execute multiple graphical applications at the same time, virtual memory, system's own device drivers). But as soon as developers decided to move to Windows platform, implementing all Windows features (including clipboard) made a good sense for them, as it differentiated their product from its DOS competitors. And regarding clipboard itself, they of course had no alternative to it. The platform was owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft also defined all the standards of data interchange.

The Difference

So, what are the chances of Life Clipboard for its adoption by developers?

Three things have changed since 80’s:

1. The platform is not owned by any single company
2. While it would still make sense for the developers to implement a “rich clipboard” type of functions, it would not bring them any competitive advantage (while seamless interoperability with other applications was a reasonable competitive advantage in developer’s decision to port their application to Windows).
3. The user expectation changed (we will cover later)

Given these facts, the motivation of developers to implement Life Clipboard is very weak and is in fact a “chicken-and-egg” problem. The effort to implement this function pays off only when there are enough applications that support it. On one hand, Microsoft is a strong company, so the standard is certainly not dead. But...

User’s perspective

But on the other hand I always think we should strive for more; for something “more sexy”, which would really make a clear difference for the user.

Well, back in late 1980s, the clipboard was no doubt a big step forward. Instead of having to save file, exit the application, launch a new one and then import the saved file we got a very friendly, fast and useful tool. But even this example clearly shows that we shouldn’t exaggerate the sole role of the clipboard – without an ability to run multiple applications at once, clipboard would be virtually of no value to users.

And the same holds for the Life Clipboard concept. Something is missing to it – yet – to make the concept really appealing.

We should strive for more!

Let us then think about an idea which would be really “sexy” by itself; an idea that would excite developers and would motivate them to further extent it. To me, the manual “Cut & Paste” model doesn’t fall in this category any more. It was OK in the DOS time, but the expectations have changed since then. Today’s users would expect something more automatic and more convenient than just a tool for manual transfer of appointments and business cards from one application to another (and it doesn’t matter that all these items contain rich information).

So, what could make the real difference today?

The Vision

Imagine I find an interesting concert on a web page and want to attend. I would expect to find a simple button on the page which I can press in such a case. In the same time, system identifies me (which is technically possible already today) and asks me to confirm payment for the ticket. It also contacts directly my (web) diary (which is however automatically synchronized with any personal device I use) and writes down the event. In case there is any conflicting appointment, the system lets me know before requesting my payment. Sounds better than a simple cut and paste? Yes, indeed – because this is a real automation. But the story doesn’t finish yet.

Now, the concert is cancelled – you know, musicians are just people, so this may happen even in the future -:). Instead of driving there and finding a closed hall with a crowd of angry people, the appointment will be automatically removed from my diary (again, no technical problem – who records a particular information is also allowed to change it) and I will be informed about the change just as it occurs (which may be just a function of my diary – so nobody needs to know my personal email, IM, or whatever channel I use; nobody also needs to learn in which way and when I would like to be informed about changes). This would be a good, useful application. And still no rocket science!