Author Archives: ghotchkiss

The Credibility Crisis

We in the western world are getting used to playing fast and loose with the truth. There is so much that is false around us – in our politics, in our media, in our day-to-day conversations – that it’s just too exhausting to hold everything to a burden of truth. Even the skeptical amongst us no longer have the cognitive bandwidth to keep searching for credible proof.

This is by design. Somewhere in the past four decades, politicians and society’s power brokers have discovered that by pandering to beliefs rather than trading in facts, you can bend to the truth to your will. Those that seek power and influence have struck paydirt in falsehoods.

In a cover story last summer in the Atlantic, journalist Anne Applebaum explains the method in the madness: “This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.”

As Applebaum points out, we have become a society of nihilists. We are too tired to look for evidence of meaning. There is simply too much garbage to shovel through to find it. We are pummeled by wave after wave of misinformation, struggling to keep our heads above the rising waters by clinging to the life preserver of our own beliefs. In the process, we run the risk of those beliefs becoming further and further disconnected from reality, whatever that might be. The cogs of our sensemaking machinery have become clogged with crap.

This reverses a consistent societal trend towards the truth that has been happening for the past several centuries. Since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, we have held reason and science as the compass points of our True Norh. These twin ideals were buttressed by our institutions, including our media outlets. Their goal was to spread knowledge. It is no coincidence that journalism flourished during the Enlightenment. Freedom of the press was constitutionally enshrined to ensure they had the both the right and the obligation to speak the truth.

That was then. This is now. In the U.S. institutions, including media, universities and even museums, are being overtly threatened if they don’t participate in the wilful obfuscation of objectivity that is coming from the White House. NPR and PBS, two of the most reliable news sources according to the Ad Fontes media bias chart, have been defunded by the federal government. Social media feeds are awash with AI slop. In a sea of misinformation, the truth becomes impossible to find. And – for our own sanity – we have had to learn to stop caring about that.

But here’s the thing about the truth. It gives us an unarguable common ground. It is consistent and independent from individual belief and perspective. As longtime senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” 

When you trade in falsehoods, the ground is consistently shifting below your feet. The story is constantly changing to match the current situation and the desired outcome. There are no bearings to navigate by. Everyone had their own compass, and they’re all pointing in different directions.

The path the world is currently going down is troubling in a number of ways, but perhaps the most troubling is that it simply isn’t sustainable. Sooner or later in this sea of deliberate chaos, credibility is going to be required to convince enough people to do something they may not want to do. And if you have consistently traded away your credibility by battling the truth, good luck getting anyone to believe you.

Exclusive Interview: Larry Cornett, Yahoo Director Of User Experience Design

Note: This is the 2nd of the Just Behave series from Search Engine Land. This one ran back in February, 2007. At the time of this interview, Yahoo Search was retooling and trying to gain some marketshare lost to Google. They had just launched Panama, their ad management platform. In our eyetracking study, we found Yahoo – more than any of the other engines – loaded the top of the SERP with sponsored ads. We felt this would not bode well for Yahoo’s user experience and we talked about that in this interview. Yahoo pushed back, saying in many cases, a sponsored ad was what the user was looking for. I remember thinking at the time that this didn’t pass our own usability “smell test.” Three years later, Yahoo Organic search would be shuttered and replaced with results from Microsoft’s Bing.

This week I caught up with Larry Cornett, the relatively new Director of User Experience Design at Yahoo and Kathryn Kelly, Director of PR for Yahoo! Search. Again, to set the stage for the interview, here are some high level findings from our eye tracking study that I’ll be discussing in more detail with Larry and Kathryn.

Emphasis on Top Sponsored Results

In the study we found Yahoo emphasized the top sponsored results more than either Microsoft or Google. They showed top sponsored results for more searches and devoted more real estate to them. This had the effect of giving Yahoo! the highest percentage of click throughs on top sponsored, but on first visits only. On subsequent visits the click through rate on these top sponsored ads dropped to a rate lower than what was found on Google or Microsoft.

Better Targeted Vertical Results

Yahoo’s vertical results, or Shortcuts, seem to be better targeted to the queries used by the participants in the survey. Especially for commercial searches, Yahoo did a good job disambiguating intent from the query and providing a researcher with relevant vertical results in the product search category.

How Searching from a Portal Impacted the Search Experience

When we look at how the search experience translated from a portal page where the query is launched to the results page, we found that Yahoo had a greater spread of entry points on the actual search results page. This brings up the question of how launching a search from a portal page rather than a simple search page can impact the user experience and their interaction with the results they see.

I had the chance to ask Larry and Catherine about the Yahoo search experience and how their own internal usability testing has led to the design and the experience we see today. Further I asked them about their plans for the future and what their strategy is for differentiating themselves from the competition, namely Microsoft and Google. One difference you’ll notice from Marissa’s interview last week is the continual reference to Yahoo’s advertisers as key stakeholders in the experience. At Yahoo, whenever user experience is mentioned, it’s always balanced with the need for monetization.

Here’s the interview:


Gord: First let’s maybe just talk in broad terms about Yahoo’s approach to the user experience and how it affects your search interface. How are decisions made? What kind of research is done? Why does Yahoo’s search page looks like it does?

Larry: I can give you a little bit. I have been here about 7 months, so I’m still fairly new to Yahoo. But I can tell you a little bit about how we move forward with our decision making process and the approach we are taking with Yahoo.. We try to strike a balance between user experience and the needs of business as well as our advertising population. We want to provide the best user experience for the users who are trying to find information and give them most efficient experience they can have and then also provide a good ecosystem for our advertisers. And we do a tremendous amount of research here: we do a lot of usability testing, we do surveys. We also do eye tracking studies. All those help inform us when thing are working really well for users and one we need to work on improving things.

Kathryn: And we do bucket testing on a lot of different features, on different properties, to get feed back from our users before ever implementing any new features.

Gord: Since we conducted the study we’ve noticed some changes on the search interface. Do changes tend to be more evolutionary or do you lump them together into a major revision and roll them out together?

Larry: I’d say we do both. We have essentially two parallel tracks. One is continuous improvement, so we’re always looking to improve the experience. They would be considered the evolutionary changes based on a lot of data we are looking at. Then we also have larger things that we’re definitely interested on a more strategic direction, that we look at in a longer term window for larger changes.

Gord: One of the things that we did spend a fair amount of time on in this study is this whole idea of perceived relevancy. If we set a side the whole question of how relevant are the actual results based on the content of those results and what shows, and look more how quickly scent is picked up by the user and how the results that they see are perceived to be relevant. Does that notion coincide with your findings from the internal research and how is that idea of the appearance of relevancy rather the actual relevancy play into the results you present?

Larry: Yes, that absolutely is similar to the types of research findings that we’ve had, specifically with some of the eye tracking studies. We also continue to make efforts on actual relevance so our Yahoo search team is constantly doing improvements to everything to have real relevance improve. But you right, that perceived relevance is actually the most important thing because, at the end of the day, that’s what the users are looking at and that’s what they walk away with. In terms of: Was my search relevant? Did I find what I was looking for?

I do like the concept that you have with the information scent, the semantic mapping. I think it definitely ties into the mental model that a user has when they approach search and they are doing a query. They looking for things that come back to match what they have on their mind, what they are looking for in the results, so the more they actually see those search terms and things they are having in their mind, in terms of what they’re expecting to see, the more relevant the search is going to be for them.

Gord: It comes down to the efficiency of the user experience too, how quickly they find what they are looking for, how quickly they think they find what they are looking for and how successful that click through is. Did the promise match up with what was actually delivered on the other end?

Larry: Yes absolutely.

Gord: One of the biggest differences we saw between Yahoo and the other engines was the treatment of the top sponsored ads. I think it’s fair to say that in both the percentages of the searches that ads were presented for and the number presented, you were more aggressive than MSN (now Live Search) and Google. Obviously I understand the monetization reasoning behind that, but maybe you can speak a little bit as far as the user experience.

Larry: Sure, I mean in many cases those results are, and even in your report you showed this, those results are exactly what the users are looking for. Very often what they see in that sponsored section actually is a good fit for the type of query they are doing, especially if you look at a commercial query. So it’s always finding that balance between monetization and showing organic results. We’re just trying to get the best results for the user based on what they are looking for.

Gord: I certainly agree with you with the fact that in a lot of cases the sponsored results were what they were looking for, but we couldn’t help but notice that there was always a little bit of suspicion or skepticism on the part of the user, both in how they scan the results, and even when they do click through to a result there seems to be a hesitancy to stop there. We found a tendency to want to check out at least the top organic listing as well. One thing with Yahoo is that, with the more aggressive presentation of top sponsored, their choices on the organic tend to get pushed closer and closer to the fold. Have you done any testing on that?

Larry: Yes, those are definitely things that we are exploring as we’re trying to improve the user experience. And we’ve done our own eye tracking as well. A lot of it does come down to a big difference between what’s above the fold and what’s below the fold. So we’re always being very careful when we’re exploring that, thinking about the dominant monitor resolution, settings that we’re looking at as people start to have more advanced systems and larger monitors and really trying to understand what they seeing when they given that first load of the search page.

Gord: We did notice that of all the three engines, Yahoo has the highest percentage of click throughs on top sponsored and first visits. A little more then 30 % of the clicks happened there. But we noticed that it dropped substantially on repeat visits, much more then it did on the other engines. Combine that with the fact that we saw more pogo sticking on Yahoo then we did on the other engines; someone would click through a top sponsored ad then click back to the search results. So, my question is; does the more aggressive presentation of top sponsored ads even out when you factor in the repeat visits and does those lower repeat click through rates negatively impact the monetization opportunities on those repeat visits?

Larry: I can’t get into too many details about that, because it starts to get into some of the business logic and business rules that we have. Especially looking at CTR (click through rates) and repeat visits, so yes, that’s probably a little more information that I actually have access to, myself.

Gord: OK, we’ll put that one off limits for now. Let’s shift gears a little bit. One of the other things that we noticed, that actually works very well on Yahoo, was Yahoo Shortcuts on the vertical results. It seems like you are doing a great job at disambiguating intent based on query and really giving searchers varied options in that vertical real state. Maybe you can talk about that.

Larry: You are absolutely right that those are very effective. And you’ll probably notice over time that we’re continuing to refine our Shortcuts, try to find even more appropriate shortcuts for different types of queries. A lot of that is based on the best end result, what the user is trying to find, and the more we can give them that information the better

Kathryn: And it’s faster too, right?

Larry: Exactly. So a lot of time people just want a quick answer; they don’t want to have to dig through a lot of web pages. They just want a very simple quick answer, so if we can provide that, then that is a great experience for them.
Kathryn: And we found that certain queries like movies, entertainment, weather, sports, travel, blend very nicely with those types of Shortcuts.

Gord: In talking to Google about this, they have fairly strictly monitored click throughs thresholds in both their top sponsored ads and on their vertical results; and if results aren’t getting clicked they don’t tend to show. It automatically gets turned off. What’s Yahoo’s approach to that? Are you monitoring CTRs and determining whether or not vertical results and top sponsored ads will appear for certain types of queries.

Larry: We definitely monitor that as well. We’re interested in tracking usage and so looking at the CTR, because we don’t want to be showing things that are not actually getting usage, so we do continually monitor the CTR and the Shortcuts.

Kathryn: Are you just referring to the Shortcuts or to all of the ads?

Gord: Both; top sponsored and vertical results or Shortcuts.

Kathryn: It’s the same for both.

Larry: Obviously we track CTR in both of those areas and look at that trend over time.

Gord: When we look at the visibility difference or the delta between those top sponsored ads and those side sponsored ads, when you factor in conversion rates, click through rates and everything else, is the difference as significant as it appears to be from an eye tracking study? How do you work with your advertisers to maximize their placement and to help them understand how people are interacting with that search real estate?

Larry: That is actually a separate team that works with those folks.

Gord: Is there overlap between the two departments? You would be on top of how the user is interfacing or interacting with the search results page. Do you share that information with that team and keep them up to date with how that real estate is been navigated?

Larry: Absolutely, it’s a very collaborate relationship, We are in communication constantly, they are giving us performance, we are giving them performance. So it’s always a very collaborative kind of relationship with that team. We definitely can give them recommendations and vice versa. We each have our own worlds that we own.

Gord: Maybe you can speak a little bit from the user’s perspective how Yahoo is when you position it against Microsoft Live Search and Google. What’s unique, why should a user be using Yahoo rather than the other two?

Larry: I’d say one of the key differentiators that you’ve seen released last year, and Terry Semel actually talks about this, is that we’re starting to introduce social search. If you look at Yahoo Answers, it’s one of the key examples of that. It’s a very exciting site that’s performing very well. There’s a lot of great press around it, and we starting to integrate that within the search experience itself, so you can do certain types of queries within search and at the bottom of the page you’ll see relevant best answers that are brought from Yahoo’s Answers. In many cases people look at that and say that it actually adds value. That’s one of the key differentiators here; there is definitely a social aspect to Yahoo Search.

Gord: As Yahoo Answers and that whole social aspect gains traction , is that something that either be moved up as far as visibility on the real state page, moved up into that Golden Triangle real estate or would it be rolled in almost transparently in what the results being shown are?

Larry: Anything is possible, but it’s something that we’re evaluating, so we’re constantly looking at data that comes from user studies and the live site performance, and so we’ll be making a decision about that as the year goes on.

Gord: One other thing that I think somewhat distinguishes Yahoo, especially from Google, is where the searches are launched from. When you look at user’s experience, obviously you are taking into consideration where those Yahoo searches are being launched from; a tool bar versus a portal versus the search page. How does that factor into the user experience?

Larry: You’re right. We definitely look at that type of data and really try to understand how those users might be different and their expectations might be different. So we’re constantly looking at that whole ecosystem because Yahoo is a very large network, with a lot of wonderful properties, so you have to understand how we all play together and what the relationship is between the properties back and forth.

Kathryn: Another thing is knowing where to put a search box on what property and what is going to work with the right mix of users for that property, because not every property is conducive to having a search box prominently displayed, and that’s something that we look at very closely.

Gord: Which brings up another question. One of the things that we speculated on the study is; does the intent of the user get colored based on the context that shows around that search box? If it gets launched from a very clean minimalist search page, there is little influence on intent, but if it gets launched from a portal, where there is a lot of content surrounding it, the intent can then be altered in between the click on the search box and ending up on the search page . Do you have any insight on that? Have you done your own studies on that impact?

Larry: We are definitely doing research within that area to understand the affect of the context and I don’t really have anything I can share at this point but I would say that there’s probably a lot of very interesting information to be derived from looking at that.

Gord: Ok. I’ll go out on the limb once more and say: Obviously if you can take the contextual messaging or what is surrounding that search box, and if it obviously correlates to the search, then I suppose that will help you in potentially targeting the advertising messaging that can go with that, right?

Larry: I think that’s fair to say.

Gord: Ok. I’ll leave it there. One question I have to ask comes down to the user interface. It seems as changes are made the differences between the three engines are getting fewer and fewer and it does seem like everyone is moving more to the standards that Google has defined. Is Google’s interface as it sits the de facto standard for a search results page now and if so, then in what areas does Yahoo differentiate itself? I’m talking more about the design of the page, white space, font usage, where the query bolding is…that type of thing.

Larry: There are a lot of really smart people in each of those companies. They also do their own user studies and they look at their metrics, so I think everyone is realizing over time that they’ve refined their search experience, what is working and what is not. So it’s not surprising to see some convergence in terms of the design and what seems to be most effective. I can’t really speak to whether Google is the de facto standard, but definitely they have a lot of eyeballs, so I think people do get use to seeing things in a certain way. I know from the Yahoo perspective that we want to do what’s best for our users. And I think we do have a user population that has certain expectations of us. I think a big part of that is the social search component, because people do think of Yahoo as a distinct company with its own brand, so there’s a lot that we want to do on that page that is completely independent of what other people might be doing because we want to do what’s best for our users.

Kathryn: And our users tend to be different than Google users. There is obviously overlap but we also have a distinct type of user than Google. We have to take that into consideration.

Gord: Can we go a little bit further down that road? Can we paint a picture of the Yahoo user and then explain how your interface is catering to their specific needs?

Larry: I can’t speak too much about it but one difference is that Yahoo is a lot of different things. We’re not just a search company, not just a mail company, not just a portal company; we serve a lot of needs. And we have a lot of tremendously popular, very effective properties that people use. Millions and millions come to the Yahoo network every day for a whole variety of reasons, so I think that’s one thing that’s different about the Yahoo user. They’re not coming to Yahoo for one purpose. There is often many, many purposes, so that’s something we definitely we have to take into consideration. And I think that’s one reason of many that we’re looking at social search. We know that our users are doing a lot of things in our network and it’s really effective if we’re aware of that.

Gord: So, rather then the task oriented approach with Google where their whole job is to get people in and out as quickly as possible, Yahoo Search supports that community approach where search is just one aspect of several things that people might be doing when they are engaged with the various properties?

Larry: We want to support whatever the user’s task is; and I think search is actually a very simple term and it encompasses a lot. People use search for a whole variety of reasons, millions and millions of reasons, so you have to be aware of what their intent is and, you talk a lot about that in your report, you support that. If they want to get in and out, that’s one task flow. If they want to have a place where they have access to data and information that is coming from their community, all the social information that they think is valuable, that’s another task flow. So, I think just being aware of the fact that search is multi-faceted, it’s not just a simple single type of task flow.

Kathryn: And another thing we talk about a lot is that Google is really about getting people off of their networks as fast as possible; we tend to want to keep people in our network and introduce them to other properties and experiences. So I think that’s also something that we take a look at.

Gord: So, what’s the challenge for Yahoo for search in the future, if you were looking at your whiteboard of the things that you’re tackling in 2007? We talked a little bit about social search, but as far as the user’s experience, what is the biggest challenge that has to be cracked over the next year or two?

Larry: We’ve been touching on that and I think the biggest challenge is really disambiguating intent. Really trying to understand what does the user want when they enter a few words into the search box. It’s not a lot to work with, obviously. So the biggest challenge is understanding the intent and giving them what they’re looking for, and doing that in the most effective way we can. Yes, probably not anything new but I’d say that is the biggest challenge.

Gord: And in dealing with that challenge, I would suspect that moving beyond the current paradigm is imperative in doing that. We’re used to interacting with search in a certain way, but to do what you’re saying we have to move quickly beyond the idea of a query and getting results back on a fairly static page.

Larry: There are certain expectations that users have, because search is search, and it’s been that way for many years, but I think you can see with our strategy with social search and what we’ve been doing with the integration of Yahoo Answers that it is a shift. And it’s showing that we believe for certain types of queries and for certain information that it’s very useful to bring it up, not just purely algorithmic results.

Gord: I’m just going to wrap up by asking one question, and I guess…somewhat of a self serving question, but with our eye tracking report, are there parts where we align with what you have found?

Larry: No…I found the report fascinating. I think you guys have done a wonderful job. It’s a very interesting read. There is a lot of great information there. And I think there is a lot that is in sync with some of our findings as well. So I think you definitely found some themes that make a lot of sense.

Gord: Thanks very much.

Next week, I talk with Justin Osmer, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft about the new Windows Live Search experience, how MSN Search fared in the eye tracking study, and how MSN Search evolved into the Live Search experience.

Bots and Agents – The Present and Future of A.I.

This past weekend I got started on a website I told a friend I’d help him build. I’ve been building websites for over 30 years now, but for this one, I decided to use a platform that was new to me. Knowing there would be a significant learning curve, my plan was to use the weekend to learn the basics of the platform. As is now true everywhere, I had just logged into the dashboard when a window popped up asking if I wanted to use their new AI co-pilot to help me plan and build the website.

“What the hell?” I thought, “Let’s take it for a spin!” Even if it could lessen the learning curve a little bit, it could still save me dozens of hours. The promise given me was intriguing – the AI co-pilot would ask me a few questions and then give me back the basic bones of a fully functional website. Or, at least, that’s what I thought.

I jumped on the chatbot and started typing. With each question, my expectations rose. It started with the basics: what were we selling, what were our product categories, where was our market? Soon, though, it started asking me what tone of voice I wanted, what was our color scheme, what search functionality was required, were there any competitor’s sites that we liked or disliked, and if so, what specifically did we like or dislike?  As I plugged my answers, I wondered what exactly I would get back.

The answer, as it turned out, was not much. As I was reassured that I had provided a strong enough brief for an excellent plan, I clicked the “finalize” button and waited. And waited. And waited. The ellipse below my last input just kept fading in and out. Finally, I asked, “Are you finished yet?” I was encouraged to just wait a few more minutes as it prepared a plan guaranteed to amaze.

Finally – ta da! – I got the “detailed web plan.” As far as I can tell, it had simply sucked in my input and belched it out again, formatted as a bullet list. I was profoundly underwhelmed.

Going into this, I had little experience with AI. I have used it sparingly for tasks that tend to have a well-defined scope. I have to say, I have been impressed more often than I have been disappointed, but I haven’t really kicked the tires of AI.

Every week, when I sit down to write this post, Microsoft Co-Pilot urges me to let it show what it can do. I have resisted, because when I do ask AI to write something for me, it reads like a machine did it. It’s worded correctly and usually gets the facts right, but there is no humanness in the process. One thing I think I have is an ability to connect the dots – to bring together seemingly unconnected examples or thoughts and hopefully join them together to create a unique perspective. For me, AI is a workhorse that can go out and gather the information in a utilitarian manner, but somewhere in the mix, a human is required to add the spark of intuition or inspiration. For now, anyway.

Meet Agentic AI

With my recent AI debacle still fresh in my mind, I happened across a blog post from Bill Gates. It seems I thought I was talking to an AI “Agent” when, in fact, I was chatting with a “Bot.” It’s agentic AI that will probably deliver the usefulness I’ve been looking for for the last decade and a half.

As it turns out, Gates was at least a decade and a half ahead of me in that search. He first talked about intelligent agents in his 1995 book The Road Ahead. But it’s only now that they’ve become possible, thanks to advances in AI. In his post, Gate’s describes the difference between Bots and Agents: “Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.”

This is exactly the “app-ssistant” I first described in 2010 and have returned to a few times since, even down to using the same example Bill Gates did – planning a trip. This is what I was expecting when I took the web-design co-pilot for a test flight. I was hoping that – even if it couldn’t take me all the way from A to Z – it could at least get me to M. As it turned out, it couldn’t even get past A. I ended up exactly where I started.

But the day will come. And, when it does, I have to wonder if there will still be room on the flight for we human passengers?

Just Behave Archive: Q&A With Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience

This blog is the most complete collection of my various posts across the web – with one exception. For 4 years, from 2007 to 2011, I wrote a column for Search Engine Land called “Just Behave” (Danny Sullivan’s choice of title, not mine – but it grew on me). At the time, I didn’t cross-post because Danny wanted the posts to be exclusive. Now, with almost 2 decades past, I think it’s safe to bring these lost posts back home to the nest, here at “Out of My Gord”. You might find them interesting from a historical perspective, and also because it gave me the chance to interview some of the brightest minds in search at that time. So, here’s my first, with Google’s then VP of Search Products and User Experience – Marissa Mayer. It ran in January, 2007 :

Marissa Mayer has been the driving force behind Google’s Spartan look and feel from the very earliest days. In this wide-ranging interview, I talked with Marissa about everything from interface design to user behavior to the biggest challenge still to be solved with search as we currently know it.

I had asked for the interview because of some notable findings in our most recent eye tracking study. I won’t go into the findings in any great depth here, because Chris Sherman will be doing a deep dive soon. But for the purpose of setting the background for Marissa’s interview, here are some very quick highlights:


MSN and Yahoo Users had a better User Experience on Google

In the original study, the vast majority of participants were Google users, and their interactions were restricted to Google. With the second study, we actually recruited participants that indicated their engine of preference was Yahoo! or MSN (now Live Search), as the majority of their interactions would be with those two engines. We did take one task at random, however, and asked them to use Google to complete the task. By almost every metric we looked at, including time to complete the task (choose a link), the success of the link chosen, the percentage of the page scanned before choosing a link and others, these users had a more successful experience on Google than on their engine of choice.

Google Seemed to Have a Higher Degree of Perceived Relevancy

In looking at the results, we didn’t believe that it was the actual quality of the results that lead to a more successful user experience as much as it was how those results were presented to the user. Something about Google’s presentation made it easier to determine which results were relevant. We referred to it in the study as information scent, using the term common in the information foraging theory.

Google Has an Almost Obsessive Dedication to Relevancy at the Top of the Results Page

The top of the results, especially the top left corner, is the most heavily scanned part of the results page. Google seemed to be the most dedicated of all the three engines in ensuring the results that fall in this real estate are highly relevant to the query. For example, Google served up top sponsored ads in far fewer sessions in the study than did either Yahoo or MSN.

Google Offers the “Cleanest” Search Experience

Google is famous for its Spartan home page. It continues this minimalist approach to search with the cleanest results page. When searching, we all have a concept in mind and that concept can be influenced by what else we see on the page. Because a number of searches on Yahoo! and MSN were launched from their portal page, we wondered how that impacted the search experience.

Google Had Less Engagement than Yahoo with their Vertical Results

The one area where Google appeared to fall behind in these head to head tests was with the relevance of the OneBox, or their vertical results. Yahoo! in particular seemed to score more consistently with users with their vertical offerings, Yahoo! Shortcuts.

It was in these areas in particular that I wanted to get the thinking of Marissa and her team at Google. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. In fact, I have said in the past that Google has set the de facto standard for what we expect from a search engine, at least for now.

Here’s the interview:

Gord: What, at the highest level, is Google’s goal for the user?

Marissa: Our goal is to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for and get off the page as quickly as possible

If we look at this idea of perceived versus real relevancy, some things seemed to make a big difference in how relevant people perceived the results to be on a search engine: things like how much white space there was around individual listings, separating organic results from the right rail, the query actually being bolded in the title and the description and very subtle nuances like a hair line around the sponsored ads as opposed to a screened box. What we found when we delved into it was there seemed to be a tremendous attention to that detail on Google. It became clear that this stuff had been fairly extensively tested out.

I think all of your observations are correct. I can walk you through any one of the single examples you just named and I can talk you through the background and exactly what our philosophy was when we designed it and the numbers we saw in our tests as we had tested them, but you’re right in that it’s not an accident. For example, putting a line along the side of the ad as opposed to boxing it allows it to integrate more into the page and lets it fall more into what people read.

One thing that I think about a lot are people that are new to the internet. A lot of times they subconsciously map the internet to physical idioms. For example, when you look at how you parse a webpage, chances are that there are some differences if there are links in the structure and so forth, but a lot of times it looks just like a page in a book or a page on a magazine, and when you put a box around something, it looks like a sidebar. The way people handle reading a page that has a sidebar on it is that they read the whole main page and then, at the end, if it’s not too interesting, they stop and read the sidebar on that page.

For us, given that we think our ads in some cases are as good an answer as our search results and we want them to be integral to the user experience, we don’t want that kind of segmentation and pausing. We tried not to design it so it looked like a side bar, even though we have two distinct columns. You know, There are a lot of philosophies like that that go into the results page and of course, testing both of those formats to see if that matches our hypothesis.

That brings up something else that was really interesting. If we separate the top sponsored from the right rail, the majority of the interaction happens on the page in that upper left real estate. One thing that became very apparent was that Google seemed to be the most aware of relevancy at that top of page, that Golden Triangle real estate. In all our scenarios, you showed top sponsored the least number of times and generally you showed fewer top sponsored results. We saw a natural tendency to break off the top 3 or 4 listings on a page and scan them as a set and then make your choice from those top 3 or 4. In Google, those top 3 or 4 almost always include 1 or 2 organic results, sometimes all organic results.

That’s absolutely the case. Yes, we’re always looking at how can we do better targeting with ads. But we believe part of the targeting for those ads is “how well do those ads match your query?” And then the other part is how well does this format and that prominence convey to you how relevant it is. That’s baked into the relevance.

Our ad team has worked very very hard. One of the most celebrated teams at Google is our Smart Ads team. In fact, you may have heard of the Google Founder’s Awards, where small teams of people get grants of stock of up to $10,000,000 in worth, split across a small number of individuals. One of the very first teams at Google to receive that award was the Smart Ads team. And they were looking, interestingly enough, at how you target things. But they were also looking at what’s the probability that someone will click on a result. And shouldn’t that probability impact our idea of relevance, and also the way we choose to display it.

So we do tend to be very selective and keep the threshold on what appears on the top of the page very high. We only show things on the top when we’re very very confident that the click through rate on that ad will be very high. And the same thing is true for our OneBox results that occasionally appear above the top (organic) results. Larry and Sergey, when I started doing user interface work, said we’re thinking of making your salary proportional to the number of pixels above the first result, on average. We’ve mandated that we always want to have at least one result above the fold. We don’t let people put too much stuff up there. Think about the amount of vertical space on top of the page as being an absolute premium and design it and program it as if your salary depended on it.

There are a couple of other points that I want to touch on. When we looked at how the screen real estate divided up on the search results page, based on a standard resolution, there seemed to be a mathematical precision to the Google proportions that wasn’t apparent on MSN and on Yahoo. The ratio seemed pretty set. We always seemed to come up with a 33% ratio dedicated to top organic, even on a fully loaded results page, so obviously that’s not by accident. That compared to, on a fully loaded page, less than 14% on Yahoo.

That’s interesting, because we never reviewed on a percentage basis that you’re mentioning. We’ve had a lot of controversy amongst the team, should it be in linear inches along the left hand margin, should it actually be square pixelage computed on a percentage basis? Because of the way that the search is laid out linear inches or vertical space may be more accurate. As I said, the metric that I try to hold the team to is always getting at least one organic result above the fold on 800 by 600, with the browser held at that size.

The standard resolution we set for the study was 1024 by 768.

Yes, we are still seeing as many as 30% plus of our users at 800 by 600. My view is, we can view 1024 by 768 as ideal. The design has to look good on that resolution. It has to at least work and appear professional on 800 by 600. So all of us with our laptops, we’re working with 1024 by 768 as our resolution, so we try to make sure the designs look really good on that. It’s obvious that some of our engineers have bigger monitors and bigger resolutions than that, but we always are very conscious of 800 by 600. It’s pretty funny, most of our designers, myself included, have a piece of wall paper that actually has rectangles in the back where if you line up the browser in the upper left hand corner and then align the edge of the browser with the box you can simulate all different sizes so we can make sure it works in the smaller browsers.

One of the members of our staff has a background in physics and design and he was the one that noticed that if you take the Golden Ratio it lined up very well with how the Google results page is designed. The proportions of the page lined up pretty closely with how that Ratio is proportioned.

I’m a huge fan of the Golden Ratio. We talk about it a lot in our design reviews, both implicitly and explicitly, even when it comes down to icons. We prefer that icons not be square, we prefer that they be more of the 1.7:1.

I wanted to talk about Google OneBox for a minute. Of all the elements on the Google page, frankly, that was the one that didn’t seem to work that well. It almost seemed to be in flux somewhat while we were doing the data collection. Relevancy seemed to be a little off on a number of the searches. Is that something that is being tested.

Can you give me an example?

The search was for digital cameras and we got news results back in OneBox. Nikon had a recall on a bunch of digital cameras at the time and we went, as far as disambiguating the user intent from the query, it would seem that news results for the query digital cameras is probably not the best match.

It’s true. The answer is that we do a fairly good job, I believe, in targeting our OneBox results. We hold them to a very high click through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it’s not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that’s scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance. We do have a few niggles in the system where we have an ongoing debate and one of them is around news versus product search

One school of thought is what you’re saying, which is that it should be the case that if I’m typing digital cameras, I’m much more likely to want to have product results returned. But here’s another example. We are very sensitive to the fact that if you type in children’s flannel pajamas and there’s a recall due to lack of flame retardation on flannel pajamas, as a parent you’re going to want to know that. And so it’s a very hard decision to make.

You might say, well, the difference there is that it’s a specific model. Is it a Nikon D970 or is it digital cameras, which is just a category? So it’s very hard on the query end to disambiguate. You might say if there’s a model number then it’s very specific and if only the model number matches in the news return the news and if not, return the products. But it’s more nuanced than that. With things like Gap flannel pajamas for children, it’s very hard to programmatically tell if that’s a category or a specific product. So we have a couple of sticking points.

So that would be one of the reasons why, for a lot of searches, we weren’t seeing product results coming back, and in a lot of local cases, we weren’t seeing local results coming back?. That would be that click through monitoring mechanism where it didn’t meet the threshold and it got turned off?

That’s right.

Here’s another area we explored in the study. Obviously a lot of searches from Yahoo or MSN Live Search get launched from a portal and the user experience if you launch from the Google home page is different. What does it mean as far as interaction with search results when you’re launching the search from what’s basically a neutral palette versus something that’s launched from a portal that colors the intent of the user as it passes them through to the search results?

We want the user to not be distracted, to just type in what they want and not be very influenced by what they see on the page, which is one reason why the minimalist home page works well. It’s approachable, it’s simple, it’s straightforward and it gives the user a sense of empowerment. This engine is going to do what they want it to do, as opposed to the engine telling them what they should be doing, which is what a portal does. We think that to really aid and facilitate research and learning, the clean slate is best.

I think there’s a couple of interesting problems in the portal versus simple home page piece. You might say it’s easier to disambiguate from a portal what a person might be intending. They look at the home page and there’s a big ad running for Castaway and if they search Castaway, they mean the movie that they just saw the ad for. That might be the case but the other thing that I think is more confusing than anything is the fact that most people who launch the search from the portal home page are actually ignoring and tuning out most of the content on a page. If anything you’re more inclined to mistake intent, to think, “Oh, of course when they typed this they meant that,” but they actually didn’t, because they didn’t even see this other thing. One thing that we’re consistently noticing, which your Golden Triangle finding validated, is that users have a laser focus on their task.

The Google home page is very simple and when we put a link underneath the Google search box on the home page to advertise one of our products, we say, “Hey, try Google video, it’s new, or download the new Picassa.” Basically it’s the only other thing on the page, and while it does get a fair amount of click through, it’s nothing compared to the search, because most users don’t even see it. Most users on our search results page don’t see the logo on the top of the page, they don’t see OneBox, they don’t even see spelling corrections, even though it’s there in bright red letters. There’s a single-mindedness of I’m going to put in my search, not let anything on the home page get in the way, and I’m going to go for the first blue left aligned link on the results page and everything above it basically gets ignored. And we’ve seen that trend again and again. My guess is that if anything, that same thing is happening at the portals but because there is so much context around it on the home page, their user experience and search relevance teams may be led astray, thinking that that context has more relevance than it has.

One thing eye tracking allowed us to pull this apart a little bit is that when we gave people two different scenarios, one aimed more towards getting them to look at the organic results and one that would have them more likely to look at sponsored results, and then look down to organic results, we saw the physical interaction with the page didn’t vary as much as we thought, but the cognitive interaction with the page, when it came to what they remembered seeing and what they clicked on, was dramatically different. So it’s almost like they took the same path through, but the engagement factor flicked on at different points.

My guess is that people who come to the portal are much more likely to look at ads. I like to think of them as users with ADHD. They’re on the home page and they enjoy a home page that pulls their attention in a lot of different directions. They’re willing to process a lot of information on the way to typing in their search, and as a result, that same mind that likes that, it may not even be a per user thing, it may be an of-the-moment thing, but a person that’s in the mindset of enjoying that, on the home page, is also going to be much more likely to look around on the search results page. Their attention is going to be much more likely to be pulled in the direction of an ad, even if it’s not particularly relevant, banner, brand, things like that.

I want to wrap up by asking you, what in your mind is the biggest challenge still to be solved with the search interface as we currently know it?

I think there’s a ton of challenges, because in my view, search is in its infancy, and we’re just getting started. I think the most pressing, immediate need as far as the search interface is to break paradigm of the expectation of “You give us a keyword, and we give you 10 URL’s”. I think we need to get into richer, more diverse ways you’re able to express their query, be it though natural language, or voice, or even contextually. I’m always intrigued by what the Google desktop sidebar is doing, by looking at your context, or what Gmail does, where by looking at your context, it actually produces relevant webpages, ads and things like that. So essentially, a context based search.

So, challenge one is how the searches get expressed, I think we really need to branch out there, but I also think we need to look at results pages that aren’t just 10 standard URLS that are laid out in a very linear format. Sometimes the best answer is a video, sometimes the best answer will be a photo, and sometime the best answer will be a set of extracted facts. If I type in general demographic statistics about China, it’d be great if I got “A” as a result. A set of facts that had been parsed off of and even aggregated and cross validated across a result set.

And sometimes the best result would be an ad. Out of interest, when we tracked through to the end of the scenario to see which links provided the greatest degree of success, the top sponsored results actually delivered the highest success rates across all the links that were clicked on in the study.

Really? Even more so than the natural search results?

Yes. Even the organic search results. Now mind you, the scenarios given were commercial in nature.

Right… that makes much more sense. I do think that for the 40 or so percent of page views that we serve ads on that those ads are incredibly relevant and usually do beat the search results, but for the other 60% of the time the search results are really the only reasonable answer.

Thanks, Marissa.

In my next column, I talk with Larry Cornett, Senior Director of Search & Social Media in Yahoo’s User Experience & Design group about their user experience. Look for it next Friday, February 2.

The Double-Edged Sword of a “Doer” Society

Ask anyone who comes from somewhere else to the United States what attracted them. The most common answer is “because anything is possible here.” The U.S. is a nation of “doers”. It has been that promise that has attracted wave after wave of immigration, made of those chafing at the restraints and restrictions of their homelands. The concept of getting things done was embodied in Robert F. Kennedy’s famous speech, “Some men see things as they are and ask why? I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” The U.S. – more than anywhere else in the world – is the place to make those dreams come true.

But that comes with some baggage. Doers are individualists by definition. They are driven by what they can accomplish, by making something from nothing. And with that becomes an obsessive focus on time. When we have so much that we can do, we constantly worry about losing time. Time becomes one of the few constraints in a highly individualistic society.

But the US is not just individualistic. There are other countries that score highly on individualistic traits, including Australia, the U.K., New Zealand and my own home, Canada. But the U.S. is different, in that It’s also vertically individualistic – it is a highly hierarchal society obsessed with personal achievement. And – in the U.S. – achievement is measured in dollars and cents. In a Freakonomics podcast episode, Gert Jan Hofstede, a professor of artificial sociality in the Netherlands, called out this difference: “When you look at cultures like New Zealand or Australia that are more horizontal in their individualism, if you try to stand out there, they call it the tall poppy syndrome. You’re going to be shut down.”

In the U.S., tall poppies are celebrated and given god-like status. The ultra rich are recognized as the ideal to be aspired to. And this creates a problem in a nation of doers. If wealth is the ultimate goal, anything that stands between us and that goal is an obstacle to be eliminated.

When Breaking the Rules becomes The Rule

“Move fast and break things” – Mark Zuckerberg

In most societies, equality and fairness are the guardrails of governance. It was the U.S. that enshrined these in their constitution. Making sure things are fair and equal requires the establishment of rules of law and the setting of social norms.  But in the U.S., the breaking of rules is celebrated if it’s required to get things done. From the same Freakonomics podcast, Michele Gelfand, a professor of Organizational Behavior at Standford, said, “In societies that are tighter, people are willing to call out rule violators. Here in the U.S., it’s actually a rule violation to call out people who are violating norms. “

There is an inherent understanding in the US that sometimes trade-offs are necessary to achieve great things. It’s perhaps telling that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fascinated by the Roman emperor Augustus, a person generally recognized by history as gaining his achievements by inflicting some significant societal costs, including the subjugation of conquered territories and a brutal and systematic elimination of any opponents. This is fully recognized and embraced by Zuckerberg, who has said of his historic hero, ““Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace. What are the trade-offs in that? On the one hand, world peace is a long-term goal that people talk about today …(but)…that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”.

Slipping from Entrepreneurialism to Entitlement

A reverence for “doing” can develop a toxic side when it becomes embedded in a society. In many cases, entrepreneurialism and entitlement are two different sides of the same coin. In a culture where entrepreneurial success is celebrated and iconized by media, the focus of entrepreneurialism can often shift from trying to profitably solve a problem to simply just profiting. Chasing wealth becomes the singular focus of “doing”.  in a society that has always encouraged everyone to chase their dreams, no matter the cost, it can create an environment where the Tragedy of the Commons is repeated over and over again.

This creates a paradox – a society that celebrates extreme wealth without seeming to realize that the more that wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, the less there is for everyone else. Simple math is not the language of dreams.

To return to Augustus for a moment, we should remember that he was the one responsible for dismantling an admittedly barely functioning republic and installing himself as the autocratic emperor by doing away with democracy, consolidating power in his own hands and gutting Rome’s constitution.

Face Time in the Real World is Important

For all the advances made in neuroscience, we still don’t fully understand how our brains respond to other people. What we do know is that it’s complex.

Join the Chorus

Recent studies, including this one from Rochester University, are showing that when we see someone we recognize, the brain responds with a chorus of neuronal activity. Neurons from different parts of the brain fire in unison, creating a congruent response that may simultaneously pull from memory, from emotion, from the rational regions of our prefrontal cortex and from other deep-seated areas of our brain. The firing of any one neuron may be relatively subtle, but together this chorus of neurons can create a powerful response to a person. This cognitive choir represents our total comprehension of an individual.

Non-Verbal Communication

“You’ll have your looks, your pretty face. – And don’t underestimate the importance of body language!” – Ursula, The Little Mermaid

Given that we respond to people with different parts of the brain, it makes sense that we use part of the brain we didn’t realize when communicating with someone else. In 1967, psychologist Albert Mehrabian attempted to pin this down with some actual numbers, publishing a paper in which he put forth what became known as Mehrabian’s Rule: 7% of communication is verbal, 38% is tone of voice and 55% is body language.

Like many oft-quoted rules, this one is typically mis-quoted. It’s not that words are not important when we communication something. Words convey the message. But it’s the non-verbal part that determines how we interpret the message – and whether we trust it or not.

Folk wisdom has told us, “Your mouth is telling me one thing, but your eyes are telling me another.” In this case, folk wisdom is right. We evolved to respond to another person with our whole bodies, with our brains playing the part of conductor. Maybe the numbers don’t exactly add up to Mehrabian’s neat and tidy ratio, but the importance of non-verbal communication is undeniable. We intuitively pick up incredibly subtle hints: a slight tremor in the voice, a bead of sweat on the forehead, a slight turn down of one corner of the mouth, perhaps a foot tapping or a finger trembling, a split-second darting of the eye. All this is subconsciously monitored, fed to the brain and orchestrated into a judgment about a person and what they’re trying to tell us. This is how we evolved to judge whether we should build trust or lose it.

Face to Face vs Face to Screen

Now, we get to the question you knew was coming, “What happens when we have to make these decisions about someone else through a screen rather than face to face?”

Given that we don’t fully understand how the brain responds to people yet, it’s hard to say how much of our ability to judge whether we should convey trust or withhold it is impaired by screen-to-screen communication. My guess is that the impairment is significant, probably well over 50%. It’s difficult to test this in a laboratory setting, given that it generally requires some type of neuroimaging, such as an fMRI scanner. In order to present a stimulus for the brain to respond to when the subject is strapped in, a screen is really the only option. But common sense tells me – given the sophisticated and orchestrated nature of our brain’s social responses – that a lot is lost in translation from a real-world encounter to a screen recording.

New Faces vs Old Ones

If we think of how our brains respond to faces, we realize that in today’s world, a lot of our social judgements are increasing made without face-to-face encounters. In a case where we know someone, we will pull forward a snapshot of our entire history with that person. The current communication is just another data point in a rich collection of interpersonal experience. One would think that would substantially increase our odds of making a valid judgement.

But what if we must make a judgement on someone we’ve never met before, and have only seen through a screen; be it a TikTok post, an Instagram Reel, a YouTube video or a Facebook Post? What if we have to decide whether to believe an influencer when making an important life decision? Are we willing to rely on a fraction of our brain’s capacity when deciding whether to place trust in someone we’ve never met?

Keep Those Cousins Close!

Demographic trends tend to play out on the timelines of multiple generations. Declining birth rates, increased life spans and widespread lifestyle changes can all have a dramatic impact on not only what our families look like, but also how we connect with them. And because families are the nucleus of our world, changes in families mean fundamental changes in us: who we are, what we believe and how we connect with our world.

I have previously written about one such trend – a surplus of grandparents. The ratio of grandparents to grandchildren has never been higher than it is right now, thanks to increased life expectancy and a declining birth rate. It’s closing in on 1:1, meaning for every child, there is one unique grandparent. As a grandparent, I have to believe this is a good thing.

But another demographic trend is playing out and this may not be as positive for our family structure. While the grandparent market is booming, our supply of cousins is dwindling. And – as I’ll explain shortly – cousins are a good thing for us to have.

But first, a little demographic math. In the U.S. in 1960, the average number of children per household was 3.62. This was a spike thanks to the post WWII Baby Boom, but it’s relevant because this generation and the one before were the ones that determined the current crop of cousins for people of my age.

My parents were born in the 1930s. If both of them had 3 siblings, as was the norm, that would give me 6 aunts or uncles, all having children during the Baby Boom. And each of them would have 3 to 4 kids. So that would potentially supply 24 first cousins for me.

Now, let’s skip ahead a generation. Since 1970, the average number of children per household in the U.S. has hovered between 1.5 and 2. If I had been born in 1995, that would mean I only had 2 aunts or uncles, one from my mother’s side and one from my father’s. And if they each had 2 children, that would drop my first cousin quota down to 4. That’s 20 less first cousins in just one generation!

But what does this lack of first cousins mean in real terms? Cousins play an interesting sociological and psychological role in our development. Thanks to evolution, we all have something called “kinship altruism.”  In the simplest of terms, we are hardwired to help those with which we share some DNA. Those evolved bonds are strongest with those with whom we share the most DNA. There is a hierarchy of kinship – topped by our parents and siblings.

But just one rung down the ladder are our first cousins. And those first cousins can play a critical role in how we get along with the world as we grow up. As journalist Faith Hill said, writing about this in The Atlantic, “Cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook.”

As Hill said, cousins represent a unique middle ground. We have a lot in common with our cousins, but not too much. Our cousins can come from different upbringings, can span a wider range of ages than our siblings, can come from different socio-economic circumstances, can even live in different places. We may see them every day, or once every year or two. Yet, we are connected in an important way. Cousins play a critical role in helping us navigate relationships and learn to understand different perspectives. Having a lot of cousins is like having a big sandbox for our societal development.

If you overlay societal trends on this demographic trend towards fewer first cousins, the shift is even more noticeable. We are a lot more mobile now then our parents and grandparents were. Families used to generally live close to each other. Now they spread across the country. My wife, who is Italian, has almost 50 first cousins and almost all of them live in the same town. But that is rare. Most of us have a handful of cousins who we rarely see. We don’t have the advantage of growing up together. At a time when societal connection is more important than ever, I worry that this is one more instance of us losing the skills we need to get along with each other.

From my own experience, I have found that the relationship between my cousins is vital in negotiating the stewardship of our families as it’s handed off from our parent’s generation to our own. I personally have become closer to many cousins as – one by one – our parents are taken from us.  Through our cousins – we relive cherished memories and regain that common ground of shared experience and ancestry.

Bread and Circuses: A Return to the Roman Empire?

Reality sucks. Seriously. I don’t know about you, but increasingly, I’m avoiding the news because I’m having a lot of trouble processing what’s happening in the world. So when I look to escape, I often turn to entertainment. And I don’t have to turn very far. Never has entertainment been more accessible to us. We carry entertainment in our pocket. A 24-hour smorgasbord of entertainment media is never more than a click away. That should give us pause, because there is a very blurred line between simply seeking entertainment to unwind and becoming addicted to it.

Some years ago I did an extensive series of posts on the Psychology of Entertainment. Recently, a podcast producer from Seattle ran across the series when he was producing a podcast on the same topic and reached out to me for an interview. We talked at length about the ubiquitous nature of entertainment and the role it plays in our society. In the interview, I said, “Entertainment is now the window we see ourselves through. It’s how we define ourselves.”

That got me to thinking. If we define ourselves through entertainment, what does that do to our view of the world? In my own research for this column, I ran across another post on how we can become addicted to entertainment. And we do so because reality stresses us out, “Addictive behavior, especially when not to a substance, is usually triggered by emotional stress. We get lonely, angry, frustrated, weary. We feel ‘weighed down’, helpless, and weak.”

Check. That’s me. All I want to do is escape reality. The post goes on to say, “Escapism only becomes a problem when we begin to replace reality with whatever we’re escaping to.”

I believe we’re at that point. We are cutting ties to reality and replacing them with a manufactured reality coming from the entertainment industry. In 1985 – forty years ago – author and educator Neil Postman warned us in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that we were heading in this direction. The calendar had just ticked past the year 1984 and the world collectively sighed in relief that George Orwell’s eponymous vision from his novel hadn’t materialized. Postman warned that it wasn’t Orwell’s future we should be worried about. It was Aldous Huxley’s forecast in Brave New World that seemed to be materializing:

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions…  Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.”

Postman was worried then – 40 years ago – that the news was more entertainment than information. Today, we long for even the kind of journalism that Postman was already warning us about. He would be aghast to see what passes for news now. 

While things unknown to Postman (social media, fake news, even the internet) are throwing a new wrinkle in our downslide into an entertainment induced coma, it’s not exactly new.   This has happened at least once before in history, but you have to go back almost 2000 years to find an example. Near the end of the Western Roman Empire, as it was slipping into decline, the Roman poet Juvenal used a phrase that summed it up – panem et circenses – “bread and circuses”:

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

Juvenal was referring to the strategy of the Roman emperors to provide free wheat and circus games and other entertainment games to gain political power. In an academic article from 2000, historian Paul Erdkamp said the ploy was a “”briberous and corrupting attempt of the Roman emperors to cover up the fact that they were selfish and incompetent tyrants.”

Perhaps history is repeating itself.

One thing we touched on in the podcast was a noticeable change in the entertainment industry itself. Scarlett Johansenn noticed the 2025 Academy Awards ceremony was a much more muted affair than in years past. There was hardly any political messaging or sermons about how entertainment provided a beacon of hope and justice. In an interview with Vanity Fair  – Johanssen mused that perhaps it’s because almost all the major studies are now owned by Big-Tech Billionaires, “These are people that are funding studios. It’s all these big tech guys that are funding our industry, and funding the Oscars, and so there you go. I guess we’re being muzzled in all these different ways, because the truth is that these big tech companies are completely enmeshed in all aspects of our lives.”

If we have willingly swapped entertainment for reality, and that entertainment is being produced by corporations who profit from addicting as many eyeballs as possible, prospects for the future do not look good.

We should be taking a lesson from what happened to Imperial Rome.

Paging Dr. Robot

When it comes to the benefits of A.I. one of the most intriguing opportunities is in healthcare. Microsoft’s recent announcement that, given a diagnostic challenge where their Microsoft AI Diagnostic Orchestrator (MAI-DxO) went head to head with 21 general-practice practitioners, the A.I. system correctly diagnosed 85% of 300 challenging cases gathered from the New England Journal of Medicine. The human doctors only managed to get 20% of the diagnoses correct.

This is of particular interest to me, because Canada has a health care problem. In a recent comparison of international health policies conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, Canada came in last amongst 9 countries, most of which also have universal health care, on most key measures of timely access.

This is a big problem, but it’s not an unsolvable one. This does not qualify as a “wicked” problem, which I’ve talked about before. Wicked problems have no clear solution. I believe our healthcare problems can be solved, and A.I. could play a huge role in the solution.

The Canadian Medical Association outlined both the problems facing our healthcare system and some potential solutions. The overarching narrative is one of a system stretched beyond its resources and patients unable to access care in a timely manner. Human resources are burnt out and demotivated. Our back-end health record systems are siloed and inconsistent. An aging population, health misinformation, political beliefs and climate change are creating more demand for health services just as the supply of those services are being depleted.

Here’s one personal example of the gaps in our own health records. I recently had to go to my family doctor for a physical that is required to maintain my commercial driver’s license. I was delegated to a student doctor, given that it was a very routine check-up. Because I was seeing the doctor anyway, I thought it a good time to ask for a regular blood panel test because it had been a while since I had had one. Being a male of a certain age, I also asked for a Prostate-Specific Antigen test (PSA) and was told that it isn’t recommended as a screening test in my province anymore.

I was taken aback. I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade earlier and had been successfully treated for it. It was a PSA test that led to an early diagnosis. I mentioned this to the doctor, who was sitting behind a computer screen with my records in front of him. He looked back at the screen and said, “Oh, you had prostate cancer? I didn’t know that. Sure, I’ll add a PSA to the requisition.”

I wish I could say that’s an isolated incident, but it’s not. These gaps is our medical history records happen all the time here in my part of Canada. And they can all be solved. It’s the aggregation and analysis of data beyond the limits of humans to handle that A.I. excels at. Yet our healthcare system continues to overwork exhausted healthcare providers and keep our personal health data hostage in siloed data centers because of systemic resistance to technology. I know there are concerns, but surely these concerns can be addressed.

I write this from a Canadian perspective, but I know these problems – and others – exist in the U.S. as well.  If A.I. can do certain jobs four times better than a human, it’s time to accept that and build it into our healthcare system. The answer to Canada’s healthcare problems may not be easy, but they are doable: integrate our existing health records, open the door to incorporation of personal biometric data from new wearable devices, use A.I. to analyze all this, and use humans where they can do things A.I. and technology can’t.

We need to start opening our mind to new solutions, because when it comes to a broken healthcare system, it’s literally a matter of life and death.

Our Memories Are Our Compass

“You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been”

Maya Angelou

Today is Canada Day – the Canadian version of the Fourth of July. In the past decade or so, it’s been a day fraught with some existential angst, as we try to reconcile our feelings of pride with our often-glaring imperfections as Canadians. In a country known for its readiness to apologize, this is perhaps the most Canadian of Canadian holidays – a day made for wondering if we should be saying “we’re sorry.”

 This year, it will be interesting to see how Canada celebrates. As I’ve mentioned before, what is happening south of the border has caused Canadians to have a renewed burst of patriotism and pride. We may not be united on much, but we universally know we don’t want to be the 51st state. No offence (heaven forbid) but we’re good as is, President Trump. Really.

A few days ago, I happened across a little video posted to celebrate Canada. It was a montage of “Heritage Minutes” –little vignettes of our Canadian past produced since 1990 by Historica Canada. This montage was set to a song by another Canadian icon, “It’s a Good Life if You don’t Weaken” by the Tragically Hip. The 4 minute and 29 second video checked all the boxes guaranteed to generate the warm fuzzies for Canadians: Anne of Green Gables (check), the invention of basketball and the telephone (check), the discovery of Insulin (check), the origins of Superman (check), the naming of Winnie the Pooh (check), our contributions in two World Wars (check and check). It was Canadiana distilled; more than maple syrup – which is more of an Eastern Canadian thing. More than poutine, which most Canadians had never heard of until 20 years ago. Maybe on a par with hockey.

But the montage also reminded me of some not so glorious Canadian moments. We were imperfect, in our abhorrent treatment of immigrants in the past – especially the Chinese and Japanese. And our ignoring – and worse – our attempts to irradicate the incredibly rich and diverse Indigenous history and culture because it was inconvenient to our dreams of nation building.

Canada’s history is distinct from that of the U.S.A. In the last half of 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, when immigration started in earnest, we were very much a British Colony. Anyone who was not British was treated as either a necessary evil (providing the manual labor required to build a new country) or as a persona non grata. As for those that preceded us – the Indigenous population of Canada – the British saw them as an inconvenience and potential threat to either be tamed or systematically eradicated.

This – too – is part of Canada’s history. And we have to acknowledge that, because to do so gives us a compass to navigate both the present and future. That montage reminds us that immigration built this country. And Canada’s thousands of years of Indigenous past needs to be recognized so the entire history of our nation can be honestly reconciled. We need to fix our bearings to they read true before we move forward.

Canadians today need to decide what we aspire to be as a nation in the future. And to do that, we need to remember where we’ve been. Do we ignore the fact that we are a nation of immigrants and are so much the richer for it? Do we conveniently forget that there were people here thousands of years before the first European set foot on Canadian soil? We need to fully understand what made Canada what it is – both good and bad – an imperfect country that still happens to be a pretty great place to live.

In the song that the montage is set to, the Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie sings:

In the forest of whispering speakers
Let’s swear that we will
Get with the times
In a current health to stay

But maybe we can do better than just maintain the status quo. If we remember where we’ve been, maybe we can do better in the future than where we are now.

Happy Canada Day!