TasteKid’s Journey

This article was first published as my guest post on AltSearchEngines.com

Perspective

No more than a few generations ago, our grand-grand parents have witnessed the introduction of electricity in every day life. It’s hard for us to imagine today the impact of the first applications of electricity, like the light bulb, had on the people contemporary with Thomas Edison. Then again, this was only the beginning: today, it’s almost surreal, if not impossible to imagine, a life without electric light, radio, television, phones, computers… and, the Internet. What we should keep in mind is that people were living like this not only thousands of years ago, but also less than a couple of hundred years ago.

Comparing to electricity, which, on a traditional evolutionary scale, would be too young to even mention, the Web is an infant. Born less than 20 years ago, it is still younger than the majority of the contemporary human population: a teenager that, for many of us, seems to be around forever.

Today, we think we know what the Web is all about: applications such as Facebook and Twitter define out every day browsing patterns, fill the content of thousands of blog posts and rule our world, despite the fact they’ve only been around for a few years. It is impossible to predict how the Web will look like in 10 years, but we can state using common logic that the Web as we know it today is highly likely to be at least as obsolete in 10 years time as we perceive the way it was 10 years ago.

Humans have a natural tendency to overestimate the present. I think it has something to do with our ego, that leads every generation into thinking they are in some sort of evolutionary peak, that the things they are familiar with will be around, almost unchanged, for a long period of time. The fact is, if we manage to keep things in perspective, we can see how fast and unpredictable the world evolves around us. Many well-established, “too big to fail” industries are struggling to survive and adapt these days, like the written press, the traditional music industry or even the television. Many wrong predictions, business mistakes and false prophecies have as common reason this tendency to overestimate the present and to underestimate the surprises that the future brings us. In that matter, the Web makes no exception.

Trends

The Web has changed a lot since Google first set its mission to organize the world’s information. Back then, the Web had little structure: the information was scattered across all sort of websites and personal pages, none of which looked alike. If you were searching for information on a physics phenomenon
, chances were you would have found the best resources on that particular topic on some obscure page written by a college student for a school project: the type of page you would have never found without the help of a search engine, such as Google.

Following one of the basic laws of nature, the Web, as like any other entity, gains structure as it evolves. Today we are still using Google to search for details on a physics phenomenon, out of habit, but chances are, most of the times, the first result will be an Wikipedia article; we are still using Google to search a person’s name, but again, chances are one of the first results will be that person’s Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Custom personal pages, so popular and cool just a few year ago, are dying. Publishers are less interested in developing platforms for their publications from scratch and are using one of the few popular blogging platforms instead. Shops are also deployed on existing platforms. Data is moving towards the cloud, new standards have been defined (Atom, OpenID – just to name a couple). These are all telltale signs of the subtle process through which, by emerging patterns, the Web is gaining structure, almost as if it were a living organism.

This evolution comes with a cost. While structure brings initial efficiency, it also brings on new sets of rules, makes the evolving entity become more rigid, “kills the soul” as they say, and, ironically, it’s the first sign of decay. This applies to living beings, companies and industries alike. In 10 years time, it will be very hard, if not silly to gather a small enthusiastic team of developers and work on an innovative web project, hoping it will become a major success; as hard as it would be today to gather a small team of enthusiastic mechanics and being a car manufacturer, hoping to become a name in the industry.

As I have said before, It’s impossible to predict how the Internet will look like in 10 years. Chances are though that it will be almost unrecognizable and that it will have more structure.

Search

The evolution of search is tightly related to the evolution of the Web itself, and particularly to the evolution of the structures that define it. Google has been so successful mainly because it was the first one to take advantage in an efficient way of the most powerful (and the only one, back then) structural property of the Web: the graph that has as nodes web pages and as edges the hyperlinks between them.

In the meantime, a lot of other structural properties that govern subsets of the Web have emerged. To speak of what is today one of the most popular services, Facebook has its own very powerful structure-defining information: the connections between people, that can be translated in a huge social graph. Although few people view it this way, the popular “People You May Know” tool is actually a search engine, built on top of this structure. Instead of being a text, the input consists in your own connections, and instead of receiving web pages as results, you receive recommendations of people that you may know. Although probably the more appropriate term for this tool would be “recommendation engine”, in a more broader sense it is still a search engine: it receives an input, and, based on a structure, it returns relevant information.

Trying to compete with Google at its own game is a loosing anachronistic strategy. Thinking that is possible to build a better service, that uses a similar approach and pretty much the same structural information used by the one that has been constantly adapted and tuned for the last decade by some of the brightest software engineers the world has ever seen is just silly. Still, there are people that are trying to do exactly this, and that I think is proof of lack of vision and perspective.

The future of search lies in taking advantage of the emerging patterns that form new structures on the Web in a useful way. These may be browsing patterns, social structures, large sets of formatted data, or any kind of information that has laws that govern it and make it possible to algorithmically translate it into a searchable structure.

TasteKid is my attempt of taking advantage of these new structures that have emerged on the Web. There are a lot of things to be done in order to improve this service, and its future is still fragile in the face of such an unpredictable industry. But I am excited to work on a project that explores the new possibilities the Web has to offer and to witness the positive feedback it receives from people who actually put this search engine to use for something that, at least for now, few other services offer. Thinking outside the box and understanding that the results of search engines don’t always have to be web pages that contain the searched text is the key of unlocking the potential that the modern Web has to offer to developers today.

Getting Real is one of the best resources out there for all the people participating in designing, implementing, launching, marketing and pretty much everything related to a new web-based product or service.

The book (which is free to read online and is divided in small, easy to grasp chapters) dates back to 2006, but it is probably more actual now than ever. To give just one quote:

“The first priority of many startups is acquiring funding from investors. But remember, if you turn to outsiders for funding, you’ll have to answer to them too. Expectations are raised. Investors want their money back — and quickly. The sad fact is cashing in often begins to trump building a quality product.

These days it doesn’t take much to get rolling. Hardware is cheap and plenty of great infrastructure software is open source and free. And passion doesn’t come with a price tag.”

37signals has become a cult company, and, although some may consider they’ve broken their own rules when they took external funding, many of their advices and philosophies are valuable pieces of Internet business wisdom.

Just a few days ago, YouTube announced it begun streaming full-length TV shows (“Start Trek”, for example) in partnership with CBS. This move is essentially a struggle to increase the monetization performances of the huge traffic YouTube is receiving (the shows are featuring ads). But in the same time, it can also be seen as a milestone towards the end of standard TV broadcasting as we know it today.

Of course, online streaming and Internet TV stations are available for many years, but, up until now, there has been little access to free, legal, well-known TV shows. The limited success of online TV is largely caused by the lack of availability of these shows that people are familiar with, in a known environment. This has changed now, and, as more and more shows (and, why not, movies?) will be easily available on the web, I ask myself if classic television (digital or not) has a real future.

During a conversation with Catalin Francu a couple of years ago, he told me about the way he saw the future of computer user experiences: anybody should be able to log on any machine and have instant access to their own personal working environment. This sounded a little bit far fetched back then, given the fact that this environment is dependent on all the files, the applications and their settings that a person is using.

This conversation came back to me while reading this Bloomberg article about Google’s e-mail, spreadsheet and word-processing programs, slowly but steadily biting from Microsoft Office’s market share. This isn’t just a switch from one product to another, it is a much more profound change that is happening: while Microsoft Office is locally installed and is saving files on a local hard drive, Google’s applications are web-based and are storing files on remote machines. This change has a much greater impact on the way we perceive the use of computers than the much debated approaching end of the so-called Web 2.0. era.

I don’t want to be misjudged for considering that computer work reduces to creating and handling Office-like documents, but Office is probably the primary offline suite the non-tech employees are using worldwide.

Getting people used with a new set of applications is no easy task, let alone making them comfortable with saving all their work on remote locations. But it becomes more and more obvious to me that this is, indeed, the future.

While a lot of specialized applications will still be presented in the form of software products that are installed on a particular machine, more and more people will make the transition from logging on their operating systems’ accounts to logging on their web accounts, every time another working day begins.

A recent mass-banning action performed by Digg led Mashable to perform an interesting analysis on the evolution of the Digg community. It all started just a few years ago as a democratic environment in which the news were submitted by users and promoted towards the main page by user votes, or diggs.

Nowadays, Digg is struggling to redistribute the editorial power from a handful of so-called “top users” that have managed to gain control on most of Digg’s voting process, back to the majority of its users.

This is a very interesting human behavior case study, the same way StumbleUpon is. We can easily draw a parallel between these two virtual communities and the real world we live in. They all have started as a nice dream of democratic systems in which the power “belongs to the people”, but the power seems to either inevitably concentrate in the hands of a few or loose coherency. Oh well, I guess it’s just human nature, or, depending on how you want to see it, maybe it’s just the natural thing to happen.

I have just submitted my idea to Project 10¹⁰⁰, and I encourage you to do the same with your ideas. Project 10¹⁰⁰ “is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible”, initiated by Google, who is committing $10 million to implement the top five ideas. What do you get if your idea is chosen? Well, as Google puts it, “you get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people” :)

Here is my idea exactly the way I’ve submitted it. I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful, and I am sure something similar will sooner or later emerge. Feel free to use this idea in any constructive way that you may think of.

Your idea’s name (maximum 50 characters)

Online Hospital and Medical Encyclopedia

What one sentence best describes your idea? (maximum 150 characters)

Bringing together doctors and patients in an online environment can provide assistance in situations when classic health care is not available.

Describe your idea in more depth. (maximum 300 words)

The basic functionality of this project is similar to Q&A platforms like Google Answers or Yahoo! Answers, only oriented towards medical questions. Each question, if qualified as relevant (isn’t a hoax, hasn’t been asked before) and properly categorized within a medical specialty, is answered by a professional from the community. The question then becomes a conversation. Additional details and medical test results can be requested by the doctor. Each conversation is available in the public archive, thus the project will become a free online medical encyclopedia of real case studies, written in plain language. This way, many people will find their questions already answered within the system, and both students and practicing doctors can easily access valuable reference resources. Additional features can be implemented, like real-time conversations for more urgent cases.

A hierarchical system with different authority members and supervisors within the community is maintaining the proper quality of the answers (similar to Wikipedia), while the initial triage can be performed by the newer members (maybe students), who can also answer the more simple questions. For each answer, additional notes can be made by other members of the community, while people outside the community can post comments (for example, if they have experienced a similar problem).

The active members are compensated for their effort proportionally with the quantity and quality of their answers, but they are also gaining authority within the community and reputation in real life.

More features can be developed, like regional support, a communication platform for community members, an advanced information center and an interactive diagnosis tool.

What problem or issue does your idea address? (maximum 150 words)

Whether it is unavailability of medical services, inability to move, lack of financial resources, improper health insurance, lack of time, timidity, pride, iatrophobia or fear, there are many reasons a lot of people can’t or won’t go to the doctor when they have a medical problem. Their problem can be health or life threatening, and in many cases they end up to the doctor when it is too late. Even though doctor visits are irreplaceable, an (early) online evaluation and assistance brought by specialists can prove paramount and sometimes make the difference between life and death.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how? (maximum 150 words)

The people who would benefit the most are the ones who, for whatever reasons, aren’t able to visit a doctor, are in need of medical evaluation and guidance and do have access to the Internet. Many of them live in developing countries (the Internet has spread much faster than proper health care units and systems), but there are a lot of people living in advanced countries that share the same inability. All these people can benefit by having a professional evaluating their condition and giving them proper advice, depending on the situation.

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground? (maximum 150 words)

1. Bringing together a community of doctors (and organizations) willing to participate in this program.
2. Designing and building a web application that best suits the project’s needs.
3. Making the service available to people all over the world.

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it? (maximum 150 words)

The desired outcome is to develop a system through which as many people as possible can receive free medical evaluation and guidance in an online environment. This can be achieved either by having conversations with medical professionals or by consulting the growing archive of problems that have been already addressed. A rating system can be implemented in order to determine the degree of usefulness and relevance of each resource, but in the end, it’s hard to determine the value of such an outcome. A good measure would be the number of potential health threatening problems totally or partially solved using the system, a value that can be estimated given the number of questions and answers, user ratings and traffic statistics.