Search Engines as Leeches on the Web

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for January 9 is now online at:
  > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html
	
Summary:
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little
for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from
search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and
software vendors.

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The morning after Bill Gates' CES keynote, a streaming video was available
on Microsoft's website. Nice, though poor quality at only 320x186 pixels.
But users had to sit through 6 minutes and 28 seconds of irrelevant
blather from the conference organizers talking about shuttle busses in Las
Vegas before we even get to Billg's intro segment. And we didn't hear the
first word from his speech until the 8:57 mark.

Producing for people who sit in a dark theater after trekking to Vegas is
very different from producing for people who sit in their office with
looming deadlines and distractions. Having to wait nine minutes to see the
speaker is a sure way to anger Internet viewers and prime them to shut off
the video after a smaller part of Gate's talk than they would otherwise
have seen.

Video is inherently boring online because there's no interactivity.
Minimize boredom by cutting straight to the chase and skipping intros.

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One of the products announced at the Consumer Electronics Show was the
SkyScout from Celestron. You point it at the night sky, and it tells you
the name of the constellation you are looking at. Very similar to a
product Tog and I invented ten years ago: the identification system for
zoo animals - you look through it at a habitat enclosure and the device
highlights where the animals are hiding and annotates each animal with its
species and other pertinent information.

The zoo gadget was too far from Sun Microsystems' product strategy, so it
was never built. Worse, the patent wasn't filed, which the company surely
regrets now, since the claims could have been broad enough to cover this
new product and assure a nice licensing stream. In the future, we will see
a large number of products that know where they are and what they are
being pointed at. One likely development is to build this knowledge into
cameras. For example, your camera would know that you are in Paris and
shooting the Eiffel Tower, thus automatically tagging the photo with the
relevant keywords, making retrieval easier.

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Here's an example showing the current quality of machine translation. I
was recently quoted in an AP story that also ran in Spanish newspapers,
translated into Spanish, of course. I used one of the popular translation
sites to produce a reverse translation back into English. Here's the
original quote followed by the back-translated quote:

"If you fill every waking minute with more media, you never do any
independent thinking," Nielsen said. "You may have all the specific pieces
of information, but the higher level is knowledge and understanding. You
don't have time for that reflection if it's being thrown at you at
never-ending streams. All you can do is duck."

"If one flood every minute with more mass media, never has time to think
about independent form", said Nielsen. "One can have all the specific
data, but the superior level is the knowledge and the understanding. It is
lacked time to make that reflection if one receives interminable flows of
information. Everything what one can do is to crouch itself to avoid it."

Even though the original sounds better, the basic point comes through in
the translation. You should never use machine translation to produce a
customer-facing website, but it's impressively good for simpler purposes,
such as keeping track of what's being said about you on international
websites.