One of my good friends was browsing through the bestseller list for an audiobook to buy yesterday when she found an author totally against her philosophy ranking at #9. That led her to discount the entire list as “garbage” and untrustworthy.
Are bestseller lists and platinum records obsolete in the Internet age? Does anyone care what is popular now that we have access to the long tail and customization?
Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines have become almost expected behavior when shopping online. I appreciate their utility and respect their complexity. I have certainly found a lot of new music and movies that way. It works great for eCommerce — especially entertainment and technology products. If I am trying to decide between a particular camera, I can see which model others in a similar dilemma ended up buying. These are added as helpful hints alongside results for the exact keyword matches that I searched upon.
What I loathe is when personalization overrides the default behavior, such as in Google Personalized Search. I want to see what everyone else sees. Anything that is recommended should be cumulative and not in place of the original.
Sometimes Google makes note of when they do this with an explanation and how to turn personalization off. Yet enabling it by default in the first place sets a bad precedent. Not just for SEO, but for user experience. Showing only personalized results sounds good in theory. However, let’s not forget that consistency is also a hallmark of good user experience because it avoids confusion.
If Google only gives me a convoluted way to translate to the original, I am going to get sick of referring to the “glossary” in the back to find the real meaning. Most people aren’t that patient with semantics.
And playing out that future scenario, my friends, reminds me of an old myth where no one could understand each other. It is already hard enough translating within the same language. This just might be worse, though, because our understanding of the meaning would eventually become different.
