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Do You Remember What You Used To Think?
January 16, 2006
Mark Naples makes a search perception argument this Friday last that I have to admit hurt my brain, and one from which I have since been unable to recover. Namely, that Google at the beginning really wasn't as great as everyone thought it was, it's just that everyone thought it was:
It can be because of a very elemental tenet of marketing, and, in fact, of all communications, especially public relations: perception is reality. It's not as important that Google's results were better as it is that media, analysts, IT guys, and other influencers thought that Google's results were better.
Since I read that I have been trying to remember, with as pure a conscience as I can muster, what exactly it was I thought about Google at the very beginning and, essential to Naples' argument, whether I was right or just wrongly influenced by peers and, even more strangely, my own influence among influencers.
Perhaps I was simply projecting my own desire to be counted among the influencers, indeed litmus-testing my own worthiness of inclusion in that august group, when I would perform early searches at the new Google. That's a very difficult onion to unfurl, and one for which I may need to seek therapy.
Dammit, though, I really do remember thinking Google's results were a revolution at the time. Especially against what had become utterly useless results for any given search at say, Alta-Vista, Infoseek, and Excite, just to call to mind the barren search landscape Google was born into. Remember trying to find anything useful there?
So now that Naples has stuck me in a memory glitch matrix, I find solace in the early happy opinions I have, or think I had, rightly or wrongly, about Google. I might even argue after a period of therapy to strengthen my resolve that without the revolution in useful and relevant results Google ushered in, we would still be stuck in that warp of online time where media, analysts, IT guys, and other influencers, Naples' magic group which allegedly started the whole misperception to begin with, were the only ones who attempted to use search as equipment for living in much the same manner as the connected world at large now does, in greater numbers each Month.
So did Google make search accessible as equipment for living and it was just that the above magic group was the first in the world curve to grasp it, or was it all just a conspiracy to make it seem that way so those outside the golden circle would ape their attitudes and actions? Would we be where we are now without the revolution having been based on relevancy, but merely perception?
All posts by John Lustina
posted by John Lustina at January 16, 2006 06:52 PM
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