Anti-search engines: they don't exist, do they?

As I said in my previous post, an idea of an anti-search engine -- one that scrambles your search results, making you unfindable -- made me think of some strange things search engines might do, or why they are not doing them.

Obviously, no matter how much you wish to stay hidden, you can't make someone use an anti-search engine instead of a real one. But what if you could convince search engines to hide you? Companies now pay for higher placement in search results, but what if you could pay to be placed lower? Specifically, if you don't want certain web pages that mention you to appear high in search results -- for example, if they say something unflattering about you, or have ugly pictures of you -- you could pay the search engine to place them so low that most searchers will never get to them simply because they don't have time to wade through a hundred pages of Google results. Most of us probably have something on the internet we don't necessarily want someone important (like a prospective employer or a date) to see. Yet I never heard of search engines engaging in a practice lowering the rank of certain search results. The more I think about it, the more potential issues I see with it -- many more than paying for higher placement in search results. The two concepts are not symmetrical.

There may be a conflict of interest between an individual who wants to lay low, and a website (which does not belong to that individual) that wants to maintain high rank. For example, you, Joe Smith, might want all web forums that say you're an idiot, to appear very low in search results based on "your" keywords (just what exactly are "your" keywords, is another thorny issue). The owners of those forums, however, don't like to rank low. How would a search engine resolve this conflict of interest?

But maybe there is not always a conflict of interest. If a site ranks low based on "your" keywords, it won't necessarily damage the site's rating in general. Unless you are a celebrity, the site has probably achieved its high rank based on other keywords than your name. Your name is not what drives traffic to it.

What if you are a celebrity, and the site has achieved its high ranking precisely because your name is on it? Maybe people flock ot the site to see a paparazzi picture of you with a double chin and no makeup. You don't want the public to see that picture, but if the search engine pushes the site's rank down, it will harm its traffic. How should a search engine resolve this? By auctioning off the relevant keywords (such as your name) to the highest bidder? If you really want it to rank low, you'll pay more than the site can afford to pay to keep it high? If you are a celebrity, you may also be rich, and thus able to afford a betting war or a court battle.

And a court battle may be your only recourse if, despite being neither rich nor famous, you find yourself exploited by a website that contains damaging information. Maybe it's one of those vicious college gossip forums where students speculate about other students' sex lives and openly name names. Posting rumors is entirely the point of such sites' existence, so of course they would not agree to be lowered in search results based on one victim's name -- otherwise all victims would request the same. But if there is a court battle, how does the court decide what the relevant keywords are? Would the victim's name be enough? Or should the keywords also include all the email addresses the victim has ever used, or also his/her profession, and cities he/she has lived in? E.g. "Joe Smith web designer Austin Texas"? That's tricky.

In the days of the dotcom "land grab", people and companies battled over who had a right to a particular domain name. Courts had to decide whether Joe Smith the individual had a higher right to joesmith.com than, say, Joe Smith Trucking Inc. They usually ruled in favor of companies. But complexity of such decisions pales in comparison to complexity of deciding which keywords a person is entitled to.

Considering all this, it's probably a good thing that no search engine, to my knowledge, provides a service of pushing your search results down. Though I have to wonder how many of them have thought about it.

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Hmmm, I could have spun this post off as an April Fool's joke. But no -- my analytical nature would ruin any attempt at humor. So you, dear reader, are safe. :-)

Software to extract meaning out of life's trivia

Here's a very interesting article in Washington Post, that ties in to some degree with Clive Thompson's article on ambient awareness (discussed in my previous blog post):

Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There's a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

It reflects a lot of my own thoughts about what part data plays in our lives, and how it could let us get much more out of life.

"In San Diego, statistics student David Horn [...] is working with his engineer girlfriend, Lisa Brewster, to develop an all-encompassing life tracker, under the working title of "I Did Stuff."

I would like to have these guys' job. They want to track and record everything -- everything that happens in their lives, down to (or especially) the most mundane events.

It's been known for a long time, and a recent study confirmed, that keeping a diary recording every bite they ate helped people to lose weight. And therapists recommend people who have trouble sleeping to record what they ate, drank, and did before sleep, to see if a trend emerges that shows a correlation between certain foods / activities and insomnia. Also, keeping track of your time minute-by-minute -- writing down all activities, no matter how mundane -- may allow you to see where all your time goes, if you feel you have no time for anything in your life. So there is a well-established practical use for navel-gazing, that predates the internet. And the internet made it infinitely easier to record your daily events, both the kind you do consciously (Brightkite for tracking your location, MyMileMarker.com for driving habits, Fitday.com to map food intake and calorie expenditure, Last.fm for listening habits, and even BedPost for sex life), and the kind your body does autonomously (sites for tracking heart rate and blood glucose levels, or the self-explanatory MyMonthlyCycles.com :-))

But these two researchers want to take it much further.

Tracking not just what you did, but what you got out of it

[...] David Horn already belongs to BrightKite, Last.fm and Wakoopa.com, which tracks his Internet usage. He's also experimented with Fitday.com to map food intake and calorie expenditure. It was satisfying for a while, but now he wants something bigger -- something simultaneously broader and more nitpicky -- to fill in the gaps that individual sites don't currently track.

Horn is working with his engineer girlfriend, Lisa Brewster, to develop an all-encompassing life tracker, under the working title of "I Did Stuff."

"I'd like to track the people I talk to," says Brewster, "and how inspired I am six hours later. And definitely location history -- where I am, what time -- "

"Correlated with weather history," interjects Horn. "And allergy data, pollen and mold in the air."

Plus, "Web sites I read and their effect," says Brewster. "If I spend a long time reading a blog, like TechCrunch, but I don't get noticeable output from it."

At first the author of this article is boggled by this level of self-indulgent navel-gazing, but then she seems to understand what it is about. The usefulness of tracking is of course not in the raw data (who would have the time to re-read their life at the same pace as they are living it? :-)) but in extracting trends that would help you correlate perceptions with facts.

Has it really been a month since you last had sex, or does it just feel like that? Did you really floss five times last week, or was it more like twice? Now that you realize that, are you a little less angry at your dentist for that painful last appointment?

Analysis of mundane events reveals profound trends in one's life

Self-tracking [...] is partly about the recording, but also as much about the analysis that goes on after the recording.

The apparent meaninglessness of data recorded over time is actually what makes it profound.

The problem with diaries and blogs, trackers say, is that people use them to record the events they think are meaningful. What they forget is that meaningful events are often a result of months of insignificance, a cause and effect not readily visible to the human eye but easily detected with the help of a computer program.

"Things that happen over time can lead up to bigger events," says Horn. "They may seem small by themselves, but looking at them as a whole I can see how they lead to a bigger theme or idea."

"I was always a terrible self-journaler," says Messina. "Every once in a while I'd write in a journal, but it was always a major, momentous event. 'Got to college.' 'Broke up with girlfriend.' You lose a lot of the nuance that caused that situation to come about."

Tracking can "zoom out over my entire life," he says. It could, for example, help him better understand the aforementioned breakup. "When you've self-documented the course of an entire relationship, trivia that doesn't seem like much could, over time," help him understand exactly what went wrong, and when.

Maybe, to extrapolate on Messina's idea, your weekly date night had been Friday. And maybe you were always in a tetchy mood on Fridays because you'd just come from chem lab, which you hated. Maybe the whole relationship could have been saved by switching date night to Sunday, after your endorphin-boosting yoga class. Maybe you just didn't realize the pattern, because you weren't tracking it. All the answers could be right there, in your life data.

We can extrapolate even further. Perhaps the tracking software, if it was sophisticated enough, could notice increasing frequency and viciousness of arguments between you and your significant other, increasing frequency and length of time spent apart, and things like that. The software could flag it to you as a warning sign that the relationship is in danger. Then you could take steps to get it back on track. You might say most people don't need software to tell them when their relationship is off track; however, I think people often ignore warning signs -- sometimes wilfully, sometimes out of inertia. Inertia certainly plays a huge part in everything we do. We would rather keep a mental image of things as they were at their most comfortable, or downplay the significance of worrisome events, than acknowledge the truth that something is going astray. Life-tracking software could point out discrepancies between our partner's words and actions. It could force us to pay attention to those signs before it is too late.

The software could also give us tools to defuse certain recurring arguments which, if unexamined, tend to pick up destructive strength like a hurricane crossing the Gulf of Mexico. :-) You could look at the software and say: "we've had this discussion before; here is what was said; here is the conclusion we have reached. Do you have any new information that would give us a reason to revisit this issue?"

Of course, there are a lot of people -- most people, perhaps -- who would hate the idea of having their every word or phrase recorded, and of those records being resurrected as evidence (even by people they trust). I'm sure some people might think it diminishes their relationship somehow. But how could truth diminish it? Anyway, that's a social engineering problem, though those are often harder than computer engineering. Among the latter, a major problem would be to find a way to structure the data so as to capture its essential qualities. For example, how would you compute the intensity of the four horsemen of Apocalypse (made famous by John Gottman): Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling? How do you quantify formless, deeply subjective data? How do you even decide what to measure? It would be a tough task, but one I would gladly spend years working on, if I didn't have to worry about making a living. :-)

In fact, if I had come of age at the time of Web 2.0., I would seriously consider going to grad school so that I could do this project as my thesis / dissertation. I would probably find a professor somewhere in some university who could get interested in this idea enough to serve as my advisor. (I've seen people in computer science departments doing stranger projects than that. Or if not in computer science, then surely in the interdisciplinary studies. :-))

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A brief fantasy of a web application

that I might like to write as a hobby if my day was three times as long...

If your spouse thinks your child is poorly behaved, while you think your child's behavior is fairly good for her age, how do you decide where the truth lies? Is one of you too lax, or does the other has unrealistic expectations for a 3-year-old? The truth may lie in a large scale study that would let one compare their child's behavior against that of thousands of other children of the same age. Where would one easily come across such data? Why, that's where internet and social networks come into play.

There could be a web-based application that allowed a parent to record a child's daily tantrums, as well as episodes of good behavior. Then it could draw various statistical conclusions from those numbers. At the very least it would let a parent to discover where their child falls on the curve of his or her peers. This would, of course, require many parents' participation. They would need to track every instance of their offspring's good or bad behavior: every tantrum, every "please" and "thank you", and so on.

Mind-numbingly tedious? You bet. But, if the latest explosion of social web applications is any indication, people like to do mind-numbingly tedious things, as long as they get to do them on the internet. :-) Well, a certain category of people do. Witness the popularity of Twitter. If people don't get tired of posting what they ate for lunch, some of the same people might become just as obsessive about posting their child's behavioral microupdates. And of course they don't have to be at a computer for that. A text messaging-enabled cell phone is enough.

The internet indeed has a way of converting tedious chores into games. It's a quality that's already been leveraged by such applications as Chore Wars, where players get points for chores they do. Once you get stoked about beating fellow players, you don't even notice that you've finished cleaning your kitchen! Indeed humans (or a certain category of humans) are all about keeping scores. So an application that exploits this urge has a potential to do well.

And let's not forget that parenting is a competitive sport anyway -- so if anyone is inclined to keep scores, parents would be among those people! :-)