I really enjoyed this, thank you for sharing. Related, sometimes I feel like Google search has ruined traditional ways of navigating for information. People go into the search and they expect to get similar results the same way they do with Google, so they don’t need to learn the vocabulary, they don’t need to know the keywords. But when you’re doing a search like that through SharePoint online for example, it’s not giving you similar results. It’s giving you the documents that match your search term.
So now everything has to get smart enough to catch up with Google because people expect that information at their fingertips. They don’t want to take the extra effort to figure out a few different keywords they could use in their search. They want the search to be intuitively smart enough to pull related information and give them what they need. (Actually they want to drop all the docs in an AI tool and have a chatbot give them the answers so they don’t have to look for it at all.)
I do some knowledge management in my work so I’m thinking about this a lot, sometimes we have to remind people that things at work don’t work like they do on Google. There aren’t many ways to build in shortcuts given our limitations and they will have to learn some stuff so they can narrow their searches better and find information.
Interesting read! What resonated with me the most was the part highlighting how relationships are second to content on social media. I’ve always felt particularly guilty of unempathetically consuming media without considering the human behind it, but this article outlining how this attitude was developed and how it pervades online life rlly connected the dots for me.
This is one of the things I find fun and engaging about coding – I need to be specific, because two seemingly similar searches can produce very different results due to how specific the search terms can be. I’ve also noticed that even in the case of google people often refuse to actually try when the information isn’t on the first page. While I do partially credit the fact that I almost always can find the information I want to being willing to look to other sources than google, a lot of the time my “secret” is to look using multiple search terms, or like, on the second page…
I do love the side of the internet that democratizes knowledge, and see many good things about it, but I think there’s a point to the text either way, especially with the new ai results (and ai pages overall) making context so much more importat, and neccessetating human interaction for those of us who want to be sure our information is sound…