Class 13 - Search // Where do you want to go today?
Apéritif
RFC as koan
- C. Weider, P. Deutsch, A Vision of an Integrated Internet Information Service (December 1994)
Emulator as koan
Themes
- the “search engine wars”
- search algorithms
- mapping the internet
- searching versus portals
Prompts
- How has the concept of “web search” changed since 1993?
- How would you find something on the web now if search engines didn’t exist?
Description
Episodes: - S4E4 “Tonya and Nancy”, S4E5 “Nowhere Man”, S4E6 “A Connection is Made”
Search versus curation starts to become the next big thing. There is tension between whether it’s more valuable to offer a complex search algorithm versus having experts curate useful links: quantity versus quality. Rover and COMET represent these two perspectives. Although not given as much hype as the Browser Wars (See #14), this tension between the size and complexity of the web and how to provide a portal with meaningful access is an important one.
Today, google reigns supreme in search (and search advertising) to the point of government lawsuit, but social sites have created an evolved form of the curated access to information (even if not the ‘quality’ of experts, as misinfo runs rampant).
Readings
- Jon Penland, The History of Web Search Engines: What Came Before Google? (April 2020)
- Richard E. Peterson, Eight Internet search engines compared (February 1997)
- Safiya Noble, Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls (March 2018)
- Rose Martelli, Getting Smart, the Stupid Web Way (Nov 1999)
- Vanessa Fox, Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data (June 2011)
- Wikipedia, Timeline of web search engines