In an Op-ed piece published in December 28th 2009 issue of the New York Times, (www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html) Adam Raff argues that Google’s results are  biased towards promoting its own information services, and that concern, along with the search engine’s ability to “penalize” a firm’s  ranking in its search results, should make us all think about expanding the concept of  Internet access neutrality to “search neutrality” as well.  

While we are not convinced about the specific Google  bias argument, (in fact some of our tests seem to have disproven Raff’s allegations)  the author  does make an important larger point . That is, how do we all ensure that any private entity,  whether it’s today’ Google, a future Google with different ownership and priorities, or any other firm that captures the vast majority of the search market, does not limit or unfairly skew  our ability to fairly access information?

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame tried creating an “open source” search engine, called Wikia Search that relied to a large degree on user contributions. We reviewed Wikia Search in The Information Advisor in 2008 and found that it did not work very well at all, and in fact the experiment was ended in Spring 2009.

What led Wales to try this though was worth considering. He believed that this “future of Internet search”, as it sees it, needs to be guided by are four organizing principles:

Transparency – Openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, both in the form of open source licenses, and in open content and APIs

Community – The ability of everyone to contribute in some way (as individuals or entire organizations), along with a strong social and community focus

Quality – An effort to significantly improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results and the searching experience

Privacy – The need to protect privacy and the commitment to not store or transmit any identifying data

Here’s another idea: what about the concept of some research towards the creation of a publicly funded search engine? An “NPR for search” could at least be one place we could all turn to and know that the organization’s primary goal is not to earn a profit

The answer to these questions about our reliance on privately owned search engines is not obvious, but recognition of the potential problem and a public discussion is the vital first step.

What do you think?

You can link and download the copy free here

Enjoy!

http://twtpoll.com/693nl6

Well worth reading, and ties in closely to the new Enterprise 2.0 supplement that I edit and that Information Today has just launched for readers of The Information Advisor.

The surprise is that the final decision here was to exempt firms from having to tag their narratives: eg the management discussions, executive compensation etc. From a researcher’s standpoint, that’s too bad, as this means less potential for precision searching. However the SEC says it may revisit this, and/or make this kind of tagging “optional”. We’re doing a full report on sources for searching both the EDGAR and XBRL tagged filings in the March and April issues of The Information Advisor.

A challenge to librarians now is, just how interesting is old [that is, archived, in databases, etc. ] knowledge these days?  Knowledge is being created at such a fast rate, that its value is expiring at a faster rate?   So librarians’ expertise in finding stuff that “WAS” is no longer as relevant or useful; BUT what is replacing this and what librarians need to focus on is the kind of information and connections being made in the Enterprise 2.0 organization.

Gil made several other insightful comments, as when we discussed how the economy is impacting how info pros should be thinking about their role in E 2.0. Gil said that as people are being laid off, the organization’s “connectors” are being lost–people will no longer be sure who knows what and who the go to person is, if their previous contacts have left the firm. Again, there’s an opportunity for the librarian to step in and help people surface,  identify and reach out to those connectors.

I’ll be including the entire interview in The Information Advisor’s March 2009 new quarterly supplement on Enterprise 2.0, which will also look at how to categorize and think about vendors that occupy the E 2.0 space

A survey of experts shows they expect major tech
advances as the phone becomes a primary device for
online access, voice-recognition improves, and the
structure of the Internet itself improves. They disagree
about whether this will lead to more social tolerance,
more forgiving human relations, or better home lives

Recommended reading for the day

You know when you are aware of something for awhile, but then a news story appears that confirms what you already know. Today that happened as I read today’s Times‘ article on “Medical Web Searches and Escalating Fears”: Microsoft Finds Top Results Lead to Anxiety.

I always brace myself when a family member or friend has some unexplained ailment and says they are going to try to figure out what’s wrong by checking online. If that person has the least bit of hypochondria or general prone to worry, they are bound to zero in on the worst possible potential causes, no matter how remote, as to why they are suffering from that sore throat, rash, tiredness etc.

Of course we all know that the Web is an unbelievably fantastic resource for all sorts of do it yourself kind of research and figuring out whatever you’re grappling with, including health and medical related information in general. And there are countless stories of discoveries made online that have empowered all of us with invaluable medical information. But when we are not feeling well, and add our fears, ignorance of probabilities, and a tendency to zero in on the most dramatic and sensational, then the Web is then not the best place to calmly assess the reasons why you are suffering from that ailment.

So remember–if you’re feeling out of sorts after your Thanksgiving meal, the most likely reasons are from eating too much, being tired from travel, family stresses, and so on– beware of self diagnosis by keying  your symptoms into a search engine!

Happy Thanksgiving….

While I don’t pretend to have anywhere near the influence of Jeff Jarvis, or that this post will have the impact of his famous “Dell Hell” “Dell Sucks” rant on his blog of several years ago, I do think I need to vent about an experience I had last evening while trying to get someone at HP to help me with a problem DeskJet printer. I can only hope that my experience will somehow be picked up by HP. (And after all, I just wrote a book called The Art of Strategic Listening (Paramount Market Press, 2008)  about how firms need to monitor consumer discussions on blogs and social media to track how they’re doing and identify trends)

The summary of my own HP Hell adventure is this: After I managed to find the correct customer contact number on the Web (no easy feat unto itself); the rest of the evening unfolded as follows:

Contact 1. 10pm: Reached HP’s “customer care”, and was told I would need to enter my credit card number and pay $34.95 up front in order for a technician to troubleshoot this with me. Not happy about this, but OK, at least if I’m paying—and paying upfront—at least I’d get some quick and effective help. The customer service person took down my problem (the printer icon disappeared from my printer folder and trying to reinstall drivers just gave me “fatal error” messages) gave me a confirmation number, ticket number and said “hold on I’m transferring you”.

ON HOLD…………………45 minutes…………….

Contact 2. 10:45pm. Man picks up the phone, hears my problem, apologies that “they transferred you to the wrong department”, and says “I’ll transfer you”…I say, OK, but I’ve been on hold for 45 minutes, so I hope that I can speak with someone quickly…

ON HOLD…………..10 minutes…………………

Contact 3: 10:55pm. Woman answers phone, asks me to repeat all my information again even though I give her my ticket number. She says “what department do you want?” I say I already told and paid for technical assistance. OK, “now I can refer you to a technician, she says “I’ll transfer you”. I say, “OK, so the next person will be able to help me, right, I’ve been waiting nearly an hour” She says yes…

ON HOLD……………20 minutes………………….

(I BEGIN TAKING NOTES NOW!)

Contact 4: 11:15 pm. I am sent to a voice mail menu where I am asked to press 1 for PCs; 2 for Printers and 3 to speak to a technician. (So should I hit 2 or 3?) I hit 3 for a technician.

ON HOLD………..5 minutes……………….

Contact 5: 11:20 pm I begin to hear very faint conversations in the background, and a distant, ethereal type of connection is made as I am on hold, but hear unintelligible background voices. A woman picks up and I know now I have been transferred to a call center in India. She tells me she will put me through to “technical support”. I am known for being a laid back and relaxed person, but I am getting agitated! I tell her I have talked to four or five people already. (And…Monday night means “Headlines” on Jay Leno at 11:45pm and I don’t want to miss it!) I am no longer very pleasant on the phone, but try to keep my cool. If I had not already paid for the service, and knew that starting over would be even worse, I would have hung up and called it a night

ON HOLD……..10 minutes….

Contact 6: 11:30 pm. Another woman at a call center in India. She asks me if I am calling for the “All in One” HP Printer. I say, no, I am calling for the Deskjet 1430. She says that she cannot help me and will need to transfer me to the department that handles that model. She then tells me to speak louder because she cannot hear me—our connection is terrible.

ON HOLD……10 minutes……….

Contact 7: 11:40 pm. A man in the India call center tells me that he is the technical support person and can help me. I explain my problem and he begins the troubleshooting process. He is friendly and responsive, but each time he asks me a simple question (e.g. “What icons do you see in your printer folder”), he needs to put me on hold for about 5 minutes to do, I don’t know what—look up what to do next in his technical manual?, assist other customers? After 30 minutes of this glacially slow conversation, we work together to power off the printer (his instructions to me were very strange but they worked—eg open and close the cover of your printer 4 times). At the end he asked me “Are you happy now?”

12:10 am. It’s now the next day! Leno’s Headlines is long over. Perhaps it wasn’t a funny one. But I didn’t have many laughs this evening.

• Total Time on Phone: 2 hours 10 minutes
• Total no. of Transfers: 7, to 6 humans; and one voice mail
• Level of Satisfaction: Zero

And how was your evening?

]]> http://www.ia-blog.com/2008/11/18/an-awful-evening-on-the-phone-with-hp/feed/ 0 http://www.ia-blog.com/2008/11/03/the-recession-financial-crisis-and-info-industry/ http://www.ia-blog.com/2008/11/03/the-recession-financial-crisis-and-info-industry/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:18:57 +0000 Robert Berkman http://www.ia-blog.com/?p=148 In an interview today with the CEO of a well known business information product vendor, the CEO confirmed that his firm’s sales were down quite a bit: primarily as a result of the loss of the buying power of financial service firms such as Lehman and other Wall Street companies.

He also mused that the Thomson Corporation, which really relies on the financial services industry as clients for its products and services must be feeling this downturn acutely.

This all makes me wonder what the impact of the recession and the collapse of the Wall Street financial services industries have on the information industry as a whole?