I tend to doubt that Yo-Yo Ma ever goes on Google or Bing and searches for “cello technique.” But assuming that he did, what would he find? Mostly advice for beginners and amateurs, I’m afraid. True, that’s the most “popular,” but I doubt that this would be of much use to him.
I am willing to bet that you occasionally have the exact same problem. Sure, if you have a question about doing something you’ve never done before, the search results are usually quite satisfying. There are tons of web pages filled with self-proclaimed experts explaining general basics to beginners.
But here’s the problem: I am a lifelong professional performer (at the moment, a speaker), and as I peruse that massive data dump known as the Internet, I often find an intriguing title of an article that seems germane to my profession. But 99 times out of a hundred, the article is written by an intermediate practitioner, and is aimed at other intermediates or beginners.
This information is not just useless; sometimes it reinforces conventional “student” approaches that I learned years ago to be counterproductive at the pro level. I have to remember to not fall back into them.
I wish there was some kind of filter on a search engine (or on twitter) that would only lead me to pages designed to be “expert to expert.” Or maybe some kind of automated system that rates web pages the same way the wine spectator rates bottles of wine on a one-to-100 scale. As it is, it’s all pot luck based on general popularity.
I am a big fan of David Meerman Scott and his New Rules of Marketing and PR, but he has been almost too successful in proselytizing New Age Internet marketing. Millions of people, myself included, are marketing by publishing content. There’s an awful lot of data cranked out every minute, and frankly, it is not all created equal. Wading through it all is wasting a lot of my time.
So to all you search site whizkids, here is my suggestion for you: first, create a little toolbar that allows one to define various attributes of reader and publisher personaes. For example, when I search for “marketing oneself as a professional speaker,” please let me filter results so that the only ones that come back are written by people who run reputable speaker bureaus, or people who get paid at least $10,000 per appearance. (And please leave out any pages written by people who market this service to eager beginners … please…)
Another search result improvement option is to allow me to grade any web page based solely on its applicability to moi. That way, you could aggregate data of people similar to myself, and judge just how appealing/useful a given page’s content will be to me, and not send me to pages designed for third graders. Rather than giving me the exact same search results for a given string of words as you give to everyone else, why not shade my search results, based on profiles and grades of previous readers, and by seeing how I have graded past search results myself? As it is, on every current search engine, for any given “search phrase” I’m getting the exact same search results as every third-grader in America, as well as every 80-year-old retiree in Dubuque.
At the moment we are awash in information that is all mixed together in one big lump. This is made worse by those who seek to divine a search engine’s parameters, and game the system to have their content rank higher in search results, regardless of actual individual applicability.
The emerging opportunity here is to provide services akin to those of a knowledgeable librarian. I need a filter for all this information, based, not just on the search terms, but on who I am. At the moment, I am guided to the exact same search results without regard for the context of my own individual attributes. The search engine that figures out how to do custom searches based on my unique needs is going to get all of my future business.
© Justin Locke
