There's little point in writing a Boidem column devoted
to the idea that search has become an overriding paradigm for accessing information
- on the internet or on our computers - I already wrote just such a column five
years ago. In that column I confessed that, rather than rifle through my
plentiful bookmarks in order to find a particular page, it had become easier
simply to run a Google search on a term I was sure would show up on the page
I wanted to find. Since then, search has continued to establish itself as the
most accessible and available method of finding almost
anything. A decade ago, online catalogs offered a workable basis for locating
sites via a logical organizational structure. But the efficacy of the catalog
collapsed under the deluge of millions upon millions of sites. In much the same
manner, the bookmark - originally a very useful reminder on our own computer
of how we might get back to something housed somewhere within the vast reaches
of the web - became ineffective, and even impracticable, when we created more
bookmarks than we were capable of reviewing in a cursory glance. Simply put,
bookmarks don't scale.
But, as I've noted before (almost
a year and a half ago seems to have been the last time), the real worth
of bookmarks, their raison-d'etre, shouldn't be sought in our need, however
real, to readily return to a page we've previously visited. What bookmarking
does is cause us to stop and think, to reflect. Within the continual waves of
information that pound the beachhead of our thinking, we desperately need a
means of distinguishing between what's simply interesting, and what deserves
special attention. When we stop to bookmark a page - whether because we want
to return to it at some later date, or because we want to show it to someone
else (or for some other reason) - the activity of momentarily halting our web-surfing
in order to take special note of a page is the physical representation of an
important mental process. The bookmark itself isn't what's important, but instead
the act of taking note of something that should stand out. Lately, rather than
bookmarking, I've been sending links to pages I want to reflect upon to myself
via gmail, a method that, for me, has numerous advantages,
though any method that causes us to stop and think seems to me to be legitimate.
Though I still bookmark, most of my bookmarks are to sites
that have lengthy, or non-obvious URLs. I'm still
capable of remembering URLs that are little more than the name of the site,
meaning that I can quickly type the desired name into the address bar, add on
".com" or something similar,and get to the right site without
difficulty. For sites with these obvious, or logical, URLs, this is clearly
simpler than looking for the right name in my bookmarks. And though it may seem
counter-intuitive, conducting a new search for a site we want, rather trying
to find a saved page in our bookmarks is also almost
always faster. And that being the case, I shouldn't be surprised to learn that
more and more people are turning to search as their primary method of getting
to pages the URLs of which they may actually know, or can at least readily guess.
A blogpost titled The
URL is Dead, Long Live Search from about a month ago on the blog ReadWriteWeb
blog offered a striking example of this:
Last week I was watching TV and saw something that really caught my eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K" instead.In other words, this particular television advertisement was suggesting that it was easier to run a search for something eight letters long, rather than to type those eight letters, followed by ".com" into the address bar. It was hard not to scratch my head at this - a good case could definitely be made to claim that conducting a search for a site was today simpler, and often more effective, than retrieving it from our bookmarks. But had search truly become so ubiquitous that it was now the preferred method of connecting to a web site, even if typing the name of the site in our browser's address bar would achieve the same result?
If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren’t bothering with that inconvenient “www” and “.com” and are just going straight through Google.The post asks whether the address bar is now dead, and answers that it's beginning to appear that way:
But with Google more often that not incorporated into browser toolbars and searching directly for brand websites pretty much as quick and easy through the search engine as through typing the address direct, it may be becoming increasingly redundant for many users.All this suggests that if, three years ago, I wrote about "the tyranny of search", in the three years since that column, we've been engulfed in a trend that threatens to change that "tyranny" into a "totality", though it may also be a trend that's aided and abetted by a sort of basic internet-illiteracy. Even if it's true that people consciously choose to run a search rather than access the address bar, it's a fair guess that most users simply can't tell the difference between the two.
Return to Communications & Computers In Education - Main Page