On the OPEN Forum
Linking Search, Conversation, And Your Site
John Battelle of SearchBlog | April 18th, 2008 - 11:14 AM
(13) found this useful. Do you? 
In my last post, I promised to cover some simple ways to make your presence on the web more conversational. But before I do that, let’s talk about what I mean by “Conversational” in the context of the web (as opposed to say, a restaurant!).
I’m currently at work on a new book, provisionally titled “The Conversation Economy,” which argues that we are entering a new era of communications between business and customer. And the critical transit of that communication is the Internet – an ubiquitous medium that our customers love. (Hence my thesis, in my first post, that we’re all in the media business now, whether we like it or not).
At its core, the Web is a network of computers. As businesspeople, we’ve been in dialog with computers for some time now. But back in the 1960s and 1970s, computers were hulking machines meant for the back offices of Very Large Companies, not small businesses. These machines had a very particular interface – a command line into which you were required to type an arcane “computer language” to get anything done. The number of people who spoke this language were understandably low, and therefore, the number of people in the world who were having “conversations with machines” was also quite low.
In the 1980s, we all got “personal computers,” and thanks to the graphical user interface - “GUI” – millions of us starting talking with computers. But the conversation was hardly fluent. I call this the “hunt and poke” era of computing – we used a mouse to navigate a representational desktop; when we found something we wanted, we poked at it until it came alive for us. This gesticulative interface – not unlike what the wordless signals we employ while in a foreign land in need of the bathroom – is a step forward, but it sure doesn’t scale.
And then the Internet came along. And everything changed. Now we were not just navigating our desktops, or the back office computer files. We were navigating mankind’s possible knowledge base. The whole shootin’ match. Clearly, not a place we could hunt and poke our way through. We needed a new interface. And we found one, in search.
In a way, the search interface is a lot like the 1970s command line (anyone remember C: prompts?!). It’s a blinking cursor and a command line. But what you put into it is the magic: Words. Phrases. Language. And language is the transit of conversation.
When you enter your query into a search engine, you are beginning a sophisticated conversation with a machine. You say “discount building supplies” and bam, in less than half a second, Google responds by re-organizing the entire Internet around your input, and comes back with a web page called www.secondsandsurplus.com, as well as an entire pageful of other possible answers.
It’s a magical experience, “talking with” computers in this way, and it’s the main reason Google has become one of the most legendary companies in the very storied history of the Silicon Valley. It’s also the main reason that you have to change your approach to conversing with your customers via the web: If your site isn’t responding to your customers the way Google does, well, in the long term, you’re toast.
So what can you do? Sorry to bury the lead here, but that will be the focus of the next post, and I promise, it’s coming really soon!
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Discussion Boards
Norbert Mayer-Wittmann | April 18th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
John,
I both STRONGLY agree and STRONGLY disagree.
I strongly agree that communication involves language. But there isn’t really an all-too clear line between “natural” language and “artificial” language: English may be considered “natural” and DOS may be considered artificial, but that is a rather subjective distinction.
I strongly disagree that only Google.COM’s (or Google.DE’s or YouTube.COM’s or GMail.COM’s) algorithms will lead to informative results. If I run a hotel, then being listed on hotels.com might be far more cost-effective than bidding for “hotels” on Google.COM — because ALL search engines will “naturally” return hotels.com as a top result for people searching for hotels.
Maybe you will clarify this in a future post, but here is an explanation of why I would not “bet the farm” on Google: There is no reason why 1 algorithm will be best for all searches — if I am searching for a car, then I will want to know “does it seat 5 or 6?” but if I am searching for a house, I may want to know “does it have a swimming pool?” and if I am searching for weather information, I may want to be able to select either a radar image or a satellite image, etc. In each of these cases, a “one-size-fits-all” algorithm is NOT as useful as a method to retrieve information that is SPECIFIC to the type of information desired. Therefore, I think you are wrong to bet that one algorithm could be applied to each & every situation.
To make this clearer: if you had to have a heart bypass done, would you care whether it’s done by:
- a car mechanic (or)
- a Nobel-prize winning economist (or)
- a run-of-the-mill heart surgeon
If I were you, I would select the heart surgeon over the other two. Likewise, if I want hotel information, I would not check a weather map.
Norbert Mayer-Wittmann | April 20th, 2008 at 4:32 am
John,
I’ve been thinking alot about my response above — and perhaps I “pushed back” too much (or perhaps I have misinterpreted what you mean — and I’m eager to learn more about what you mean). My point here is that I now feel (and I hope I understand you correctly:) your point has less to with Google’s algorithms (which I argued above might not be as suitable as more specifically “tailored” algorithms), but rather (perhaps?) it has more to do with the “willingness to engage in conversation” — an attitude of “attentive listening” (which is apparent in the empty “search box”). For more on this, see also “Consumers market themselves to businesses — how should a business respond?” ( http://openforum.com/thread.jspa?threadID=580000149 )
Over the years, Google has become widely recognized as a trust “listener” — and one that will “simply report the facts”. What amazed me was when Google declared that it was changing it’s algorithms (and/or filtered the results) because they were not giving the results that the designers “wanted to see” — and the community of users STILL believed that the results presented were “trustworthy” (two prominent cases of this were “miserable failure” and Google.CN ).
If your point is that it is important to establish and maintain a relationship of “available” (and IMHO also: “trusted”) resource, then I wholeheartedly agree. But Google lost MY trust long before entering China and also long before filtering out “miserable failure” links from it’s “search engine results pages” (SERPs) — they lost MY TRUST when their VP of Engineering said at a press conference about 2 years ago that they DID NOT want creditcards.com to “show up” for a search for “credit cards” (at that point, it became clear to me that Google would prefer to highlight its own web sites ahead of other online properties that might be used to find information).
I look forward to your next installment, because this one has (for me at least) raised so many interesting questions!
John Battelle of SearchBlog | April 20th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Thanks NMW, in fact, my point was broader, that search must be modal and case driven, and to do so, a lot have to change. No single algorithm, indeed!
Richwell | April 21st, 2008 at 7:26 am
I do remember the C: prompt! And I owned one of the first PC’s. But it was my interest in search that got me interested in computing in the seventies. Interested enough to do a degree. You make some very good points about the driver of this incredible rate of development being the need to find stuff. The development of the algorithms will be the accelerate that powers it. Google is currently the best at it but their incredible success will continue to attract increasingly better solutions. AS an economist I see the incentive in making the conversation easier to follow.
jgross | April 27th, 2008 at 9:37 am
NMW, I really liked your comment at SearchBlog that I think is relevant to this conversation:
http://battellemedia.com/archives/004399.php#comment_130794
If I understand John correctly, then I think I agree that the “customer is King” approach seems alot more reasonable than the “pork belly” approach.
If advertisers wish to get *optimal* results — as in: very efficient, very effective, very high signal-to-nose ratio — then they will need to tailor their campaigns — actually define the target audience and design focused campaigns that are truly engaging.