I’m not a big fan of Google’s new result page which seems to favor freshness and a ubiquity of entry points over relevance. Or, in other words, it is increasingly referring to itself (Google News, Updates, YouTube) for results as may be seen in the following picture:

Let’s look at the ranking of the results:

1. Google News Results
2. Google’s best friend Wikipedia (hitting Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button more than often sends you to a Wikipedia entry. Or as Mathys from Mobypicture stated: “When Google is out of luck (when it doesn’t know where to send you after hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button) it will send you to Wikipedia
3. A “plain” website.
4. Realtime results from the Updatesphere. Note that these updates are constantly refreshed so that there is always something moving.
5. Shopping
6. Images
7. Video

There is only one “plain” website listed on the first half of the page. All the other entries refer to Google’s subspheres like News, Updates, Shopping, Images, Videos except for Wikipedia. By showing a variety of results from its other indices it is becoming self-referential.

It’s no news that Google Google loves fresh content and especially updates. With its many indexing deals with popular micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca it has access to a big amount of new and fresh content. At the end of 2009 Google started displaying status updates in their results and shortly after Google officially welcomed the updatesphere as a subsphere of the web that can be searched. This subsphere has now penetrated the Google front page, along with Google’s other subspheres.

In “organizing the world’s information” Google is becoming increasingly self-referential.

Sick and tired of using Arial, Verdana and Georgia on your blog? Ok, I must admit, I love Georgia and I’ve been using it for years but after a while you want something else. There simply aren’t enough websafe fonts that look good and are compatible. There are several solutions like replacing the header with images (SEO-FAIL!) or Flash (mobile, anyone?) and more recently Typekit. I got a Typekit account months ago but never got around to implementing it because it looked so cumbersome. And now, our friend Google, released the Google Font API and it’s foolproof. Even though Typekit has way more fonts the simplicity of the Google Font API is wonderful.

Their instructions on how to use their fonts on your website are in plain English but here’s the translation to WordPress:

1. Add a stylesheet link to request the desired web font(s) in header.php:

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
   href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

2. Style an element with the requested web font in your stylesheet, eg. custom.css:

   h1 { font-size:2.4em;  font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, serif;}

That’s it! Writing this blogpost took me longer than implementing new, lovely fonts on my blog.

Google’s indexing of the updatesphere is going quite well with the recent news that it will soon show all tweets going back to March 21, 2006. However, there seems to be a very basic flaw in its search design: it returns the platform name for a query! So if I search for Google it will include Google Buzz and if I search for Twitter it will return everything posted from Twitter.

I can imagine a finegrained search similar to “Google” site:http://awebsitehere.com that would allow you so specify within which platform you would like to search. A search query would then look like this: “Google” platform:Twitter or “iranrevolution” platform:FriendFeed.

Just a thought.

Last summer during our DMI summerschool I worked with Vera Bekema, Liliana Bounegru, Andrea Fiore, Simon Marschall, Sabine Niederer, Bram Nijhof, Richard Rogers and Elena Tiis on a project titled ‘The Nationalities of Issues: Rights Types.’

We looked at the most significant rights types per country according to local Google results of the query for “rights” in the local languages. Graphic designer Vera Bekema and I visualized the results and the project was published in the Global Information Society Watch 2009.

Download the pre-print PDF with the original blue colors or the GISwatch purple edition.

Facebook seems to have overtaken Google as the number one entry point to the web according to the new Hitwise data. Even though they serve two different purposes (searching versus social networking in its broadest sense) it marks an important turning point for the increasingly central role of the social web:

Starting with the web means to start with Google as ”the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) becae “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007) (Helmond 2008: 22)

The web has always been social, with ‘Web 1.0′ systems and software like e-mail, mailinglists, fora, IRC and ICQ but Social Software and the social web is typically associated with Web 2.0 platforms that enable one-t0-many broadcasts and publications to many-to-many. The social web is taking over from the information web as the starting point of the web.

via the Next Web.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

I just finished reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis and was rather disappointed. I saw Jeff Jarvis speak at the Next Web 2009 and he is an excellent speaker and certainly knows how to entertain his audience with stories. However, as a writer I am not so impressed. The book is filled with numbers and figures of revenue, clicks, marketshare etcetera. On top of that it doesn’t read like a coherent argument.

Jeff Jarvis at The Next Web 2009

Please note that this is not a book review but a collection of notes of everything that I got out of this book for my research. I tried a new notetaking system for my research: Evernote. Instead of underlining passages I took pictures of relevant paragraphs with my Google phone, the Nexus One (the pictures in this blog post are taken with my Nikon D90) and directly uploaded them to Evernote. Evernote makes my notes available everywhere and it applies text recognition to everything that I upload so my pictures become searchable.

Evernote text recognition

Life is a beta

In both the Perceived Freshness Fetish and Identity 2.0 I describe the web 2.0 culture as a beta culture. I would like to argue that web 1.0 was always ‘Under Construction’ while web 2.0 is always ‘In Beta.’ The main difference is the disruption of the updates for the user or visitor. Websites that are ‘Under Construction’ are unfinished or are in the process of being updated. They bear signs of inaccessible construction sites that depict roadblocks. It is a disruptive update process. Services such as Google’s products that are in a perpetual beta state are invisibly being updated. Platform updates do not go unnoticed to users (as can be seen in the case of privacy settings in Facebook and Google Buzz), but it does not immediately disrupt their webflow. Updates are less disruptive because they are being performed in the backend instead of the frontend.

The term beta is also a social construct in the Google world similar to the Under Construction signs indicating “I’m sorry” or according to Jeff Jarvis a way of not having to say sorry:

“Beta” is Google’s way of never having to say they’re sorry. It is also Google’s way of saying, “There are sure to be mistakes here and so please help us and fix them and improve the product. Tell us what you want it to be. Thanks.” (Jarvis 2009: 91)¹

Google’s products often start in Google Labs before they graduate for public use. The next step is usually a few years in beta which in Google terms means that the product is mature enough for public launch but that it may come with flaws. In the summer of 2009 Google decided to remove the beta label from its major products:

Today we’re paving the road. We’re taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite. (Rahen 2009)²

Recent Google experiments are launched in Google Labs or labelled with a Preview label instead of a Beta label, as in the case with Google Wave. Beta, as Google’s way of not having to say sorry, seems to have disappeared. However, the introduction of Google’s new service Google Buzz forced Google to publicly say sorry to its users. The service, similar to Twitter, was introduced overnight without the infamous beta/preview logo. It just appeared as a new feature within/on top of Gmail. Its default privacy settings revealed a list of contacts of “people you email and chat with most.” After complaints from users about the sudden publication of their contactlist Google admitted the ‘Buzz social network testing flaws‘ to BBC News. Products are usually extensively tested with friends/family or a relatively small set of users in a private beta. Buzz was launched without these tests and users immediately pointed to its privacy flaws. While Google considers our life to be a beta where experimentation is key, Google Buzz showed that its users base is not quite ready or interested in living life as a beta.

 

Life is a beta

1. Jarvis, Jeff. What Would Google Do? New York: Harperluxe, 2009).[↩]
2. Sheth, Rajen. “Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises.” Official Google Enterprise Blog 7 Jul 2009. Web. 26 Feb 2010.[↩]