The next thing in internet search: cultural context?

[Milton Ponson]

See the article online at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11797840

23 November 2010
Last updated at 09:32 GMT. 

Why the future of search is social

By Mark Ward
Technology correspondent, BBC News
.

Internet search so far has been based on content search,with little attention to context and no attention to user values.

Social media and social networking sites feature functionality which is user defined and context based, and in some cases culture based.

There are three ways to enhance the web search, one is by user profiling, which tries to pigeonhole users by predefined templates and web usage behavioral statistics.

The second is by use of semantic web technologies which search for semantically linked content.

The third is by defining search based on culture, cultural behavior, or more particularly group behaviors based on commonly shared values, needs or other criteria.

This opens up an entirely new field of research which tries to model culture in order to facilitate internet search based on such.

Are we opening a Pandora box or exciting new fields of research in applied social sciences/

[M Izabel]

This is not new. Social Science did not do anything when AOL in the nineties categorized cyber interactions that resulted to real relationships according to color, size, ethnicity, belief, sexuality, fetish, etc.

[John McCreery]

This is new. When AOL categorized cyber interactions in the 1990s, they didn't have much to work with besides existing stereotypes. Data mining and network analysis have come a long way since then. Instead of feeble categorization in terms of a priori categories, it is now possible to envision and to implement robust mapping procedures that combine social and semantic networks, exploiting the vast amounts of easily measured behavioral data now available to the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook.

[Francine Barone]

There are certainly precursors to some of this in older web technologies and services, but I agree that, on the whole, this is new. Semantic web technologies, cultural profiling (including by less than accurate IP localization, like when I get UK pages and always have to manually click through to the US site, or being banned from viewing US content when abroad, etc), and the sheer scale of voluntary, user-generated content is different from what came before it. That doesn't mean it's a total disjuncture, just that the extent of the links between customized selves and customized web content is increasing and worth taking notice of. Users have always shaped their internet experiences through choices - deliberate, unintentional or imaginary. Now with so many competing sites, services and devices and with hundreds of millions of regular users frequenting the same cyber areas (e.g. Facebook), it's harder to keep track of where one trend ends and another begins. IRC and AOL had small bits of user creativity built in, but AOL grew up during the "proprietary" web and failed because of its limitations. IMO, new start-ups which succeed do so because they suggest heightened user "freedom" while acquiring and processing mountains of personal data. Same old game, new rules.

[M Izabel]

I remember before one could make his own front or welcome page on AOL. The pesky marketing e-mails I got were related to what I put on my page. I agree semantic web, as a whole technology/system, is new, but as a concept, it is not. Also, there are features in the technology, such as cultural, economic, and behavioral profiling; creation of groups, targets, and communities; and digital libraries, information storage, and data bank, that were already in use in the 90's. Tim Berners-Lee's seminal paper on semantic technology did not come out in 2001 without any influence from existing technologies and earlier technical concepts like Vannevar Bush’s 'memex' machine in the 40's.


Semantic Web Technologies
by: Dr. Brian Matthews

(I couldn't paste the link.)

[John McCreery]

"but, as a concept it is not."

Hal Walsh, who taught philosophy at Michigan State back in the 1960s, asserted that there are, in the whole of Western thought, no more than 75 truly original ideas and most have been around for a long, long time. From his teaching I take a lesson: What's new is almost always the working out of unanticipated consequences or, in the case of technology, better implementation. The concepts are almost always old hat.

[Keith Hart]

What is old is the idea that specialists generate the categories through which we, the punters, find what we want: librarians, marketing agencies, anonymous search algorithms. What is new is the possibility that we can find what we want more precisely through social relations we generate ourselves (David Weinberger Everything is miscellaneous). In all this talk about culture, where is the sociology of the processes involved? Goering said 'When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun'. I know how he felt.

[John McCreery]

Keith, I am totally with you on this. Cultural analysis detached from concrete social relations is missing a vital component. I learned that from Vic Turner. What is exciting about some of the new tools is that the output isn't categories. Instead, the output is maps that show where concepts and people (or groups) cluster and where they connect and overlap. Topographies replace taxonomies.



Keith Hart said:

What is old is the idea that specialists generate the categories through which we, the punters, find what we want: librarians, marketing agencies, anonymous search algorithms. What is new is the possibility that we can find what we want more precisely through social relations we generate ourselves (David Weinberger Everything is miscellaneous). In all this talk about culture, where is the sociology of the processes involved? Goering said 'When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun'. I know how he felt.