Eddie Martini's

You got the world on a string

Random Thoughts From Eddie And A Few Zingers

Eddie's number one pet peeve with the internet...everyone is trying to sell me something and few are using the internet to pass along information devoid of a sales pitch. The search engines are burying the sites where I look for information. This craziness has got to stop. Equally as frustrating is the the absence of a search engine that clearly can identify a home site. You would think it would not be that hard to find a site but the people who park sites and fill them with links that take you anywhere but where you want to go are enough to raise your blood pressure. But what's worse is all they are really after is the random click that pays them something. We need some genius to end this madness. Perhaps someone like Nova Spivack. here is what he says about search---A keyword search finds haystacks, but what you really want are the needles. How often do we do a search where it finds 593,000 results—that’s a giant haystack. The needle you want isn’t necessarily there on the first page of results, but statistics show most people don’t go beyond one or two pages of search results. If it’s not on the first two pages, we’re probably not going to find it. Instead, people do a series of queries trying to get the results they want onto the first few pages. Basically, people are hacking Google to try to get a query that gets the results they want out of the first two pages. Google doesn’t really understand what you’re asking for. It’s just trying to match statistically some keywords to some pages.

The other problem with search engines like Google is they tend to favor popular pages rather than the page that has the thing you really want, which might not be such a popular page. In Google, if the page isn’t highly linked from other pages, it probably won’t score very highly and probably won’t end up on the first two pages.

So the first phase of search is “give me the 500,000 pages”—that’s Google. But the second phase is the Semantic Web—let’s actually analyze those 500,000 pages and find the specific needles that match what you really need. That requires intelligence and reasoning.

Two Other Random Thoughts

If you're looking for a great business book, Eddie recommends one that opens your mind to new ideas. The Back Of The Napkin by Dan Roam shows you how to communicate by breaking down complex notions and letting you share an idea across cultures and levels of expertise with aplomb. This book rocks. Give it a read. Is there a more simple, more useful tool than Yahoo Answers? You pop in your questions and in short time, people with knowledge of the subject are providing you thoughts as to the answer. Maybe we should try asking it Who Makes The Best Martini? This is a tremendous tool that doesn't get enough publicity.

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