Google PageRank - innovation, albatross or just plain evil?

One issue not addressed in the recent New York Times article on Google SEO woes is whether or not PageRank is simply no longer credible or useful. Sure, when it was first introduced it provided an additional dimension to refine search results beyond keyword density, but back then sites only linked to other sites because they had meaningful or relevant information.

There was simply no other reason for linking.

PageRank provided that reason -- and single-handedly created the SEO industry (though the abundance of marketing folks that popped up during the bubble had to find something to do for a living, at least until Facebook and Twitter came along), resulting in the never ending game of one-upmanship between Google geniuses and SEO hacks.

So here's the really interesting question -- if PageRank went away, would search results become better or worse? Would diminishing the impact of the massive quantity of link and content farms allow for organic, useful content to percolate to the top like the good old days?

I think the answer is yes, particularly if the holy grail of search, the search box, were improved to help searchers write better queries.  No matter how smart search algorithms may be, the better the query, the better and fewer the results.

Another issue, beyond whether or not PageRank is still useful in improving search results, is whether or not it is actually becoming dangerous and detrimental to intellectual discourse and society as a whole. PageRank encourages the promotion of new and frequently linked content regardless of how credible the source may be (such as the non-existent link between autism and vaccines) so it will continually rank high, while older, more credible content on the same subject (but less linked to by blogs, media, etc.) gets pushed down far enough to where no one will ever bother to find it.

The result? The self-perpetuation of ignorance. That's sure evil in my book.

Are social networks driving the rebirth of the handwritten note?

I think social networks have begun to influence the offline, er, real world.

How?  Well, it may be highly anecdotal, but I have noticed a dramatic increase in notes on car windshields. One could suggest it is the holiday season what with people sharing good tidings and all, but the notes I have seen are not of the particularly friendly sort.  Here's my thinking -- as more and more people feel empowered that their opinion actually matters and must be shared, that swelling of conviction can no longer be contained within the boundaries of the Twitter or the Facebook. So wherever a social injustice may occur (or one simply has an opinion on something) people now feel they have the right -- nay the obligation -- to express their outrage. Perhaps someone could come up with a line of notepads that express generic observations, and all the user (er, person) will have to do is fill in a blank or two to contribute their thoughts and feelings.  Now that's the offline equivalent of Facebook...

And by the way, to the person who left a note on my car claiming I blocked them in, next time don't pull thru and park your SUV in front of a pile of debris, leaving a legit parking space behind you. If I only had a notepad and a time machine...

Must a user experience be "positive?"

User experience is an important dimension of software development, but it is not the entire thing. 

Sure, a "positive" user experience can increase adoption, but if the business requires things to occur in a precise way at a precise time, then the software has to enforce that, even if it means incorporating unpleasant and unnatural methods to ensure it happens exactly the way it must. 

Accomplishing this means you need to be agile in your thinking, able to see connections and intersections in new and different ways, and not be constrained by conventional thinking.

Understanding business process can create a better user experience

Software consumes, transforms and presents information. It is utterly about communication. And consumption, or capture of information, depending on the business activity supported, may be of far greater importance than how the information is represented. This is particularly true if unstructured data is feeding into the system.

As I discussed in my previous post, information simply does not have the physical or conceptual limitations of a cup holder or door knob. Thus, information design is not just about the presentation or graphical layer, but the structure as well -- data modeling, information architecture and perhaps, most important (in my experience, anyway), business process modeling, so that you have a detailed and granular understanding of the processes the user must go thru in performing a set of tasks that intersect with the software system. Process modeling helps better design the interactions and hand-offs with touch points within and outside of the system. It also helps understand the information types required, the actors involved, the constraints required by the system and the organization, additional systems or tools that are necessary, and the inputs and outputs that drive the user through to completion. 

Bottom line, the better you can understand the business and its requirements, the better and more meaningful experience you can create.