Tell me what you think are bad reasons?
As if ego was not enough to cause enough chaos in the world…..
Times are changing. Twenty years back I did want to write. I wanted to express myself. Options were limited. You could just dream of writing a book or publish an article in magazine.
Anyway internet and computers came along and things changed. You could write something which could be theoretically be ready by millions ( remember theoretically ). You did not need much to get started. Just a computer and an internet connection which lot of us got as part of our office work. This was freedom. I could write about anything I thought was important. My efforts in this direction did not go too far – http://geocities.com/NapaValley/2314/. Just a simple page with some Java Applet ( I am still surprised that it works even now. This was compiled using a JDK in 1996 ) and a few recepies. Blogging sites came along and made the job of making a personal site such an easy affair and aided in the growth of personal web ( opposed to corporate web ). Currently web is all about how it relates to people more than anything else and people also have embraced the medium with both hands.
But what are the innate human needs all these technologies fulfill
Immortality
This is one big deal which humans have been struggling with for ages. Everyone knows that we have to vanish from the face of earth someday but we still have the desire of immortality.We see our web presence as something which live beyond us. At some point people used to look as kids from a similar perspective. May be they still do.
Celebrity Feeling
Who doesn’t want to feel like a celebrity even if it is a fake one. We have grown up figuring out when a particular actor sneezed or an actress had an affair. Now time to get some piece of the cake by publishing to your followers that you are waiting for an auto and you got a tatoo in not so mentionable body parts. The real celebrities get attention to anything they do and the fake ones keep clicking on refresh buttons on their browsers to see if somebody responded to the status update they did. ( I have been even thinking of building a company which manages social updates for you and get paid on a per response mode)
Social Animal
Man is a social animal is an overused saying but the fact is that he/she is. We love to connect up and who do not love to do that also want to be perceived as they do. Some of these technologies have made being social so easy. No trip to Archies to figure out a greeting card. You just need to send a virtual drink on FB. These technologies have helped social people to become more social and non-social ( not anti social ) folks to fake it.
Identity
Internet presence has become an integral part of our identity. It is like a fashionable cloth somebody might wear or a car person might use to convey what he wants to be perceived as by external entities. Now people use social media as a similar vehicle of self expression. Social media has also evolved to focus on more of public conversations then private conversations to facilitate this.
Years ago you were what you read or what you eat, but nowdays you are what you tweet.
PS: I wrote this when Geocities was still alive and now my first date with internet is dead… Sob sob.
And thankfully yes…..
Search space was almost becoming boring. Almost everybody used Google and despite significant innovations by Yahoo ( I do like Glue pages ), search market was like the family soap operas.
Let me divide search engine evaluation into various areas and place where different players are.
Infrastructure
Search is a big beast now. Billions of pages changing at an alarming pace and billions of queries happening all over the world. To make the marriage between both is not a task for the faint hearted and the marriage has to made in split second. Infrastructure is about crawling all the pages and also providing index updates in real time. Since users are spread across all parts of the world infrastructure needs to be distributed and multi layered.
Google – best in breed. Use large farms of commodity hardware. They are amazingly fast in crawl. When we launched our site Google crawlers were at our gate in no time.
Yahoo – Pretty much the same as Google in terms of hardware. I do see a slackin their crawl speed. They do keep a backlog.
Bing – Dunno. One of the guy in my office said that Bing is so fast that it feels as if it is running on Linux. Not sure if my friends out there will think of this as a complement.
User Interface
Some people did think that Orkut and Myspace had good UIs till Facebook came along. You can’t fight with the user. You just have to respect him/her.
Google – familiarity breeds contempt. All of us have been so used to it that now you are a little bit bored ( mid life crisis kicking in ).
Yahoo – Did some interesting innovations recently in terms of glue pages. Glue pages brought the idea of different type of content together so that you can use search as a decision making tool ( although Microsoft is marketing Bing this way )
Bing – The UI is a little bit Googlish but few nifty additions. Previews – they really extract the relevant info well. In page – options do make life easier. The biggest surprise in the UI is speed. It is amazingly fast. Much much better then Google and Yahoo. I guess they should borrow some things from Yahoo glue and they will rock more.
Query Interpretation and Suggestion
If the world had a single language and a single way of expressing our needs, so many of us would be out of jobs. In the search space you can never tell the user that the query is wrong. You need to prompt the user to input the right thing or make assumptions and answer him.
Google – come on they got to be best. The query interpretation improves as you get more queries. Google has great minds working to derive knowledge from their query stream. The results show.
Yahoo – Not as good as Google but OK.
Bing – too early to comment but things work out here.
Result Relevancy
The holy grail of search lies here. All the back end algorithms which work so hard to make the marriage happen between the content and the intent.
Google – obviously much ahead
Yahoo – a worthy second
Bing – looks pretty good from what i see
Distribution
No point in having a great product but not getting enough users to use it. Google and Yahoo and their search bars and distribution deals with browsers has ensured that people can use them with significantly less friction.
Google – has become so omnipresent that they don’t need it anymore. Integrations with browsers and toolbars obviously helps.
Yahoo – Has all the distribution but people still do not use them much.
Bing – I bet Microsoft will pull out some tricks here. They have the muscle and brains to distribute it in innovative ways. I am waiting to see action here.
Now let us hit the road…. some real life queries
“where to find branded jeans in bangalore” – Bing wins here. Google is confused in branded and brand new.
“opensource testing tools” – all of them look fine
“bal krishn birla” – Little bit of ego surfing. I like Bing here as it brings up my FB profile
“iit kanpur hall 2 photos” – none of them works. Good that none of them gave me Hall 3 photos otherwise, I would have filed a law suit against all of them.
“dolo 650″ – all of them are bad
“#pj on twitter”- all you guys missed the trick. Run and fix. I am looking for the trend not Paul J
“obama speech in cairo” – Google and Yahoo look better then Bing here… Bing’s second link is an article before the speech.
“who invented the light bulb”- Bing gives direct answer
“iit kanpur galaxy” – Love you Bing. In IITK Galaxy is not related to astronomy but culture.
OK… Enogh now. Can’t keep searching everything on 3 search engines forever.
http://fourint.com/blog/2009/05/27/time-to-chat-with-laila/
More details on how to use asklaila on Chat….
Let us start with disclaimers first….. I claim no expertise ( although I might have some ) in the areas I am trying to put fundas about.
So here is my research topic, people across the word are trying to figure out, what works for their customers who come in different shapes and sizes. What are the aspects of a product which makes them click and what makes them not click. So I thought let us learn from something which appears to be totally related in the first view but I am sure you will realize the inter links soon.
Food, yes all of love having it everyday and we have been doing it for ages as a species. Even before languages developed and society became so complex that you needed to hire a consultancy company to tell you common sense. Human food habits have developed over ages and some of the food items have become more universal then others. What I will try to understand is that what makes a food universal and how we can use that knowledge in other domains.
So let us start with the first universal food. French Fries. Let the french and belgians fight over it’s origin but that is the way word knows it. Why has french fries become so popular across the world. In my opinion the reason is simple, health and taste do not go hand in hand. Most of the tasty things are not healthy and combining potatoes with oil is a very unhealthy ( and therefore tasty) combination. This is a dish which appeals to basic instincts of each individual to consume unhealthy and tasty food. Obviously I can not take anything away from MacD for making it popular across the world but ability to appeal to basic instincts of mankind has been one of the primary reason for making this popular across the world.
My next stop is in Italy. Yes I am talking about Pizza. Across the world Pizzas sell like crazy and are loved by kids and adults. So what is there in Pizza which makes it so universal. In my opinion it is due to the flexibility offered by the Pizza to mean so many tastes to so many people. I am sure 90% of the world eats a version of Pizza which most of the italians will not even call it a distant relative of original Pizza. But every one is happy with their own Pizza. My personal favorite is Wooster Street Pizza with jalapenos and pineapple as toppings. What makes pizza great is that it means so many different things to so many people.
Just to summarize my learnings from food for other businesses….
- Build something which solves a fundamental problem. In a complex societies like ours we have a multi tier hierarchy of needs but the closer you get to the bottom of the pyramid, better the probability of scaling it to a larger audience
- Be adaptable and flexible on the product content if your goal is to reach out to a large audience. All your users will not perceive you as the same product but an ability to adapt to their needs and perceptions is an important aspect.
Times have changed or evolved to put it in a different perspective. Mankind has an age old endeavour, how to make life simpler and better ( after making it complicated and worse). In the stone age the primary mode of survival was by hunting and human beings primarily developed tools aimed towards making that process simpler. Life moved on and our species figured out how to do agriculture. That was one major step in making life complicated. Agriculture needed people to settle down as it would take time for plants to grow. This obviously led to lot of lifestyle changes and human beings started creating next set of complications in their life. You would not have thought of checking email or writing a blog if you were busy with chasing wild animals or wild animals chasing you.
The next wave came few thousand years later. When we moved from a system of almost everyone doing everything ( unless you were a king ) to an era of specializations. You could survive just by putting a OK seal on a Nike shoe without ever knowing how leather is made (who the hell wants to know that anyway). This created another interesting opportunity for mankind to make things complicated.you were a computer engineer then you could create buzz words like CORBA, OOPS, XML and scare the hell out of everyone around. If you were a doctor you can have some complicated names of diseases and lack of ability to pronounce these diseases correctly can itself be called another disease. So anyway things moved on. I am sure you are almost wondering by now if there is any co relation between the title of my article and content, so let us get back to the real issue.
Technology is primarily about building these complications and their solutions and building forgiving technology is all about building e technology in such a way that all the complications are hidden from the end user. So let us look at some stone age tools. These tools were simple and they did the work they were meant for. They never published a user manual on how to use them and never gave you a shock if you did not use them in the prescribed way. But now you might argue that this was primarily because these tools accomplished very simple tasks. This is precisely where I beg to differ my fellow earthians ( not sure if that is even a word ). I think that lot of people building the technology are just not able to put themselves in their customer shoes which come in a wide variety of sizes and colors. They always assume a user manual or basic framework of assumptions and fall flat on face when the technology gets used in an out of the box manner. So long live the example of washing machines being used as Lassi maker in Punjab . I am sure the washing machine makers never thought of this usecase while building it.
So next time you are building any piece of technology, just imagine that there is no user manual. Just get NUM ( No User Manual ) principle embedded in your psyche. If you are software developer writing code to add two numbers do not forget the case where both the inputs might be perfectly right but the sum might still have an integer overflow. If you are a restaurant owner it is a better idea to label what is salt and what is pepper after all how many people can guess it based on the number of holes. So the idea is very simple that understand your user very well, the smartest one and the dumbest one also ( both might correspond to the same human being in some cases ). And always ensure that you forgive them for all their mistakes after all you as a technology builder is existence because you have users. Your life is not worth a meaning without that user set.
Happy Forgiving Technology Building !
PS: This blog entry is also posted at http://fourint.com/blog/?p=48.
Hmmmm…. I sound crazy in the current context but here are few things which can potentialy kill Google.
1. Click Fraud – a company which lives by clicks dies by clicks(fraud ones). Click fraud has been an area of concern for lot of advertisers and they are bound to strike back. Initialy when people moved from traditional advertising models to internet advertising, they loved the measurability, simplicity and speed. But now the advertisers want to see real returns. They will not give Google their money just because they do not have better options. How about advertising in a revenue sharing mode(CPGC – Cost Per Good Click)?
2. End of search – Will search always be a big issue? Do you think that your TV remote is something for which you will pay a bagfull of money. The time is not far away when file search and net search will not be too different. I am sure Microsoft is already working on this. Browsers became non important part of the internet economy as features became competetive. Same is going to happen with search. Another issue with search is that it is totally non sticky application and migration for user is so easy that the companies will not even realize and exodus will happen.
3. Will people continue to do things on internet using a computer? I don’t think so. The computer is bound to make people’s life dull and boring to an extent that they would like to go back to humans in few years. Currently companies take pride in telling customers that you can access them via computers. Twenty years down the line, you might see ads which wil boast of the human touch. Computer will become a back end device.
4. What about Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft – Don’t write them off. Each one of them is capable of striking back with vengance. Yahoo has been involved in establishing a relationship with users ensuring they touch all parts of their life. Amazon has been banking on web services and SOA models to drive growth and has also into A9. Microsoft has an old history of beating the shit out of other companies and they always miss the first bus by design but catch the second bus and drive it with such a speed that the first bus along with it’s passengers gets crushed.
5. Business via innovation – Google as per insiders information is more of a programmer’s paradise with innovations coming from these programmers. Is this a model which will continue to work as software industry becomes more mature. Innovation is important for companies to differentiate their service offerings but overdose of innovation without business perspective can also blow you up. Google with it’s background of coding before counting dollars may not be able to sustain.
Let us start with a simple scene. I had done the mistake of taking my daughter to watch Hanuman movie and after that she has been extremely fascinated by all the Ramayana characters. One afternoon she caught me and asked me to become Hanuman and said that she will be Rama. Do I really have an option to say no to such an offer. Promptly she hands over a toy to me which is supposed to be my bat or ‘gada’. So the scene is set and the characters are set.
The first instruction for me(Hanuman) from my daughter(Rama) is go and find Seeta for me. Hmmmm… why? Not my wife? Why should I find?
Here response was very straightforward, it almost felt like it was below her dignity to do this type of job. Hunting for wife, no way I am doing that. I might have broken a bow and arrow before marriage to get you but now things have changed.
So just tough to imagine that thousands of years ago somebody outsourced the job of wife hunting. The concept of nations might not be there at that time but the concept of outsourcing was certaily there. One more scenario I can remember is subsidiary agreements East India company did with princely states of India where control of foreign affairs, defense, and communications was transferred from the ruler to the company and the rulers were allowed to rule as they wished (up to a limit) on other matters.
The first model succeeded as Seeta was found and they lived happily after(almost). But the second one lead to all the states coming under british domination in the long run and even the company died a sudden death in 1858 after India’s first struggle for independence.
So the lessons taught to us by history are clear. In the first case the outsourcing deal was based on providing value to each other whereas on the second case outsourcing was due to fear of other princely states. All the businesses follow a simple logic that manufacture it where it costs least and sell it where it can be sold for best margins. There might be short term deviations from this but long term goal will always align with this philosophy. Don’t be surprised if all the IT companies in Bangalore move to Bhogaon as the cost of living in Bangalore keeps shooting up. And if you loose your job due to this you get added to the list of people who got Bhogaoned……
