MeltingWaldo

My biggest problem with the internet is its size. There is so much information out there, but sometimes I just can’t find what I want. The companies who add the most value are the ones who deal with this. The obvious one is Google, who allows you a targeted way of searching for what you want. Another is delicious (who has finally removed those pesky dots from its name) which allows you to share bookmarks. But can we go a little further to turn the large quantity of information out there into quality?

The wisdom of crowds

While reading about a presentation at Agile 2008, I stumbled upon a theory by James Surowiecki, professing that groups can often make decisions that are better than those made by any single member of the group. Digg and Reddit already make use of this by allowing the collective web audience to highlight and vote up pages they find valuable. But why not extend this to all users and all pages, building it into the way we use the web?

Getting to France

I was recently looking for a cheap way to travel to France for a skiing holiday over Christmas. The obvious choice was a plane, but the numerous connections required, the ridiculous level of security at airports and the idea of getting up at 3am to make the flight, made us consider other options. Surely there must be an overnight bus?

I searched for various combinations of ‘bus’ ‘overnight’ ‘France’ ’ski’ ‘please’ but nothing came up. Then I tried overnight trains and came up with more hits. However as the tickets aren’t released for another month, I found lots of pages with data from 2005… useful if I could time travel back to 2005, but not at all helpful now.

So I’d have to wait another month to get more information about timetables and prices but I wanted to do something now to help others in my situation. I can’t ‘anti-bookmark’ it in Delicious. I can’t ‘unlink’ to it so it comes up lower in Google searches. But wouldn’t it be good if I could vote it down (possibly in the browser) and then this information could be linked in some magical way to my search terms, to help others who futilely tread in my footsteps?

Making it work

I know you’re thinking that others have already addressed this. But I’m envisaging two differences:

1. Voting down as well as voting up: sure, this is not the most positive way of viewing things, but I don’t want others to waste time trawling through something I’ve already been through. Many list-based websites already allow you to do this, but they serve targeted content. Which brings me to the second point…
2. I want this to apply to all web pages: whether it’s built into the browsers, Google… wherever; it needs to apply to all content.

Can cheap voting further enhance search results or does relying on higher cost linking (ala PageRank) have an intrinsic value that supersedes voting? Alternatively, could we just accept that an open wiki approach is the only chance to keep highly rated content up-to-date?