On serendipity in the web experience

Lately I’ve been thinking about serendipity in the discovery of pages while surfing the web. With all the noodling around I’ve been doing with Yahoo Pipes (bear with me, this post isn’t about Pipes but rather a lucky byproduct of how I’ve used it…), I’ve installed a few widgets on this blog - the first are the “who else is writing about this?” links underneath most posts, and in the left nav “Similar Postings around the Tubes”. Both of these use Yahoo Pipes to pull a few results out of a technorati search. The ones underneath the post use a quick search phrase I come up with for each post and the one in the left nav uses Pipes’ content analysis module to come up with the search string.

Both are imperfect in fulfilling my original goal which was to find posts fairly closely related to my postings. Nevertheless because of that imperfection, I’ve become slightly addicted to them - I regularly pull up my homepage and peruse the links and check out what technorati’s giving me. Sometimes they’re great and related to what I’m talking about - and more often than not it’s just a posting off of a small low readership blog (like this one). It comes up simply because it happened to be the most recent post on the subject (technorati returns results by recency, not relevance). So even here, if one were searching explicitly (on google) these posts would not show up. And as often as not, they’re smart and interesting. On the flip side, sometimes I find a post that is not related at all - but still just as interesting! At the best of times these finds can send me off on a tangent discovering more about whatever it is the post was talking about.

Now of course I also run into a bunch of uninteresting or spammy content, but it didn’t take long and the back button is only a click away. What I really like about this is that the process is already done - I am almost completely passive - I don’t have to go to technorati and type in something miscellaneous and see what’s there. All these links are already on the page with a title (or title fragment) to entice me in. It couldn’t be easier or quicker.

Back in the day the web was a lot more like this (waay back in the day). Search engines weren’t that great (or didn’t exist yet), what you got in your search results wasn’t as descriptive as they are now - you knew a lot less about what you were clicking in to and you got some strange results. But that was part of the interest. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad search engines are great, the web is a fundamental tool to find things out, but apparently I missed that element of surprise and discovery. With everything now so focussed and directed and search engines targetting specific ads to your query and SEO people making sure their relevant content is at the top of the list, everything is so clean and efficient. You get, generally, exactly what you ask for. There’s no more serendipity.

I love that these links can add just a little bit of that back into my web experience. It’s kind of like when you go to wikipedia and then start following interesting links. You end up somewhere completely apart from where you began. Like that but using content from tiny players in the web world and with a bit less focus.

It’s got me thinking of other ways to sprinkle that chance in. So far I haven’t come up with anything, but that’s probably because I’m not that bright. Still, it’s worth a few thoughts.

Mar 15th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: et cetera · feature · pipes