When I first ventured onto the Internet around 1993 I developed some skills to find information using Gopher, Veronica and WAIS but things were about to change. Drastically.
With the advent of the web (meaning the World Wide Web not the Internet) finding information was difficult. I believe the first browser I used was Netscape 1.1n (released in 1995). Or at least that’s the first one I remember.
Unless you knew the site URL you wanted to visit you would have to use a search engine to find the information you were looking for. At that time some of the main search engines included Infoseek, Lycos and Alta Vista. The methods by which these engines searched were created by those who built the applications. Others tried to create directories such as Yahoo, which were essentially hierarchical listings of sites by various categories. Again, this was based on the views of those who created the site and not the end user. I would consider this to be the first generation of searching.
Similarly many web sites (once you found them!) were also structured using categories. By applying the principles of information architecture, which were created by experts in information and library studies content was stored based on which category it fell into. Links to these categories were placed across the top of the site (sometimes called the global or horizontal navigation or nav). In other cases sub-navigation systems ran vertically down the left or right hand sides of the site (known as side navs). At this site the list of links above this post (e.g. Home, About, Contact…etc.) would be considered a global nav.
Some web sites would also try to include a search function of their own. Others would also provide a site map. All of these methods appealed to the different ways people found information. Many liked to use the search feature, some liked to click on links to find what they were looking for and others used the site map as a means to gain an overall understanding of the site structure. These web-based techniques are the second generation of searching.
Then came Google and everything changed. Information was much easier to find. Like the other information retrieval techniques there was method to the madness. In this case it was based on a concept called PageRank, which ranked a site in part related to its popularity. The more links a page has the higher up it will appear in the search engine results. This is the third generation of searching.
All of these methods have one thing in common. They were created by the experts that write computer programs creating applications, experts in classification and indexing of information and those that design the interfaces used by everyone else. As a result each one of these methods is “biased” towards the interest or viewpoint of the creator. What about the user that doesn’t think the same way that an information architect does? What about the person who isn’t interested in the popularity of the information they are searching for but rather its relevancy or credibility?
It is this latter concept that is so important in health care information found on the web used by the general public. Just because it is popular does not mean it is correct.
For the fourth generation it is my hope that the collaborative use of folksonomies and tagging by communities using the information will lead to a more bottom-up rather than top-down method for indexing of the content. In turn the resulting tag cloud can become the standard for finding and locating information an individual feels is the most important for their purposes.
[...] of their search results by using a pre-set listing of tags. I have previously suggested in posts on tagging and the semantic web that crowdsourcing is an essential element of adding relevance to search [...]