Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

Google is Now Smarter than Daddy

First published April 6, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It was a sad day in the Hotchkiss household. While doing her homework, my  12-year-old daughter, Alanna, had a question. Until now, she always asked me, her father. This time, she went straight to Google.  The 10-year-old, Lauren, is already heading in the same direction. I’m sensing the old days may never return.

Being in a somewhat philosophical mood (I have the time, now that I don’t have to answer questions about pH balances and what a litmus test is) I pondered the implications of this. If there’s a box that always has the right answers, what does this mean for our society? How will having instant access to the absolute authority on everything impact us?

Will the Web kill our research attention span?

If you’re of my generation, researching something in school meant heading for the library, discovering that another classmate already had the volume of World Book you were looking for, then digging into the alternatives. Remember the periodical index? You would look up topics in there, to see which magazines had published articles. It always seemed that the best articles were in Scientific American. When I was lucky enough to actually find the issue I was looking for, I would try to decipher an article that was way above my head, looking for my answers. Perseverance was a key factor here, as it was no minor task to follow the threads from article to article, wade through the verbiage and gradually piece together the information I was looking for.

Most times, I never found exactly what I was looking for. I would assemble a construct of related information, and would usually make inferences based on this that would find their way into my various reports. Of course, you would have to cite your sources for that teacher that everyone despised; the one with no life outside the classroom, who would actually take the time to check those sources out and try to trip you up.

But during this arduous process, I learned some lessons that have served me well. I discovered the sheer joy of acquiring knowledge, even if it wasn’t directly related to my quest at the time. I gained the detective skills needed for the research required when the answers weren’t easily at hand. And I probably improved my reading skills by at least one or two grade levels.

Bite-sized wisdom

Today, in the era of keyword search, answers are given out in bite sized-dollops. They quickly rise to the top from their hiding places, burrowed deep within the dense text on an academic Web site, ferreted out by the probing eye of the search engine. Within seconds, my daughter can find exactly what she’s looking for, conveniently highlighted for her.

In doing a number of usability tests, it’s becoming clear that we don’t assimilate information online the same way we do on a written page. We scan for clusters of words, and avoid large blocks of text. The Web page is not the place for studious reading, but rather a quick search-and-destroy mission, getting in, getting what you’re looking for from a heading, a bulleted list or a caption, and getting out again.

I’ve looked over the shoulder of my daughters as they do their homework (they hate it as much as you might guess) and they go straight for the obvious on a Web site. I look at all the other wonderful paths of discovery that lay just one click away, and ask them why they don’t follow them. Their answer? “But this was what I was looking for!” Are we making it all too easy?

Wisdom without the social interaction

For thousands of years, people have passed along wisdom to people. Whether it’s formal education, apprenticeships or parenting, the transference of knowledge has always taken place in a social and personal context. Knowledge was colored and tempered by personal experience and insight. Also, this process helped build our social skills, engendered respect for elders and helped provide a relevant framework with which to apply to newly acquired expertise. We were taught, we were shown, we were inspired and we were nurtured. Today, we’re just informed.

Much as I love Web search, there’s nothing very social about the process. There’s no one to help you apply what you learn. There’s no one to lend the additional insight of their own experience. Answers obtained through a search engine are detached, impersonal, and sometimes, just plain wrong. Are we trading something tremendously valuable for the ease and immediacy of getting our answers online?

Instant answers without the context of “expertise”

As hard as it was to get answers in the pre-Internet days, there was something to be said for the slow steeping in of knowledge. As we poured through encyclopedias and magazines, textbooks and reports, looking for the answers that were hidden just out of sight, we unknowingly gathered a broader expertise on the topics we were researching. This came out of necessity. Finding the answers meant you had to dig through the information surrounding them. You followed paths that were sometimes red herrings, and sometimes wonderful journeys of exploration. The lack of shortcuts made the longer trek necessary, and often, worthwhile. Today, many years later, I still marvel at the basic and simple beauty of Bernoulli’s Principle, what Gregor Mendel did in his pea patch, and the mysteries that lie locked in DNA. I didn’t have the advantage of an animated multimedia presentation, but somehow, 30 years later, the knowledge has stuck. The answers weren’t easy, but they were satisfying.

I hope my daughters have a chance to experience this, too.

What Happens on the Road, Stays in the Blog

First published December 15, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Heaven help anyone trying to lead an illicit double life on the convention circuit. Blogging and camera phones have turned us into a society of voyeurs. This is especially true in the search marketing industry. We are all content producers who publish our thoughts. During one conversation at a recent after-hours reception, we began keeping score–and realized that everyone in the conversation either had a blog or wrote a regular online column. Many did both.

It becomes even more amusing when you have one conversation over dinner at a show with a few friends, and within the next few days, all of you have posted online comments about the conversation, each from your own perspective. To find the truth, you have to triangulate the comments and discover that the substance of the conversation lies somewhere between the extremes.

This is a dynamic altering of how we communicate. The degrees of separation that divide our global community become short-circuited online. In one example, I wrote a column a few weeks ago about a conversation I had with Greg Jarboe about white hats and black hats. The event that sparked the conversation was a dinner he had with a black hat in Stockholm. A few days later, Greg was approached by someone in a coffee shop in his hometown about the column he wrote about black hat SEO. He had no idea what she was talking about, until he tracked it back to my column. Also, Danny Sullivan, in his blog, actually had me having dinner with the black hat, even though I was several thousand miles away from Stockholm at the time. Since that time, Greg has gone on to write about the same event in his blog. That one conversation has sparked at least a dozen blog posts and columns, all with slightly different takes on the actual event.

Somewhere in this observation lies something profound about the Internet. It changes the way we live. We now exist with one foot in the real world and one foot in the virtual. We are individuals, but we are also the sum of a million different parts that float around in the online world, and it’s usually search that connects those parts. We become the composite of other’s online comments about us. Our Google Doppelganger becomes a part of us, and vice versa.

Flori, my father-in-law, is an old-world Italian carpenter. To him, Gord Hotchkiss is the person who married his daughter, fathered his grandchildren, and who does something vaguely unexplainable with computers. We get along wonderfully, but our conversations center on our shared experiences: family camping trips, what my daughters are doing, homemade Italian wine, and why I’m out of town so much. Once, when I was on the road, he asked my wife why I have to speak at these shows. In an effort to explain, she Googled me. Up came about 16,000 entries, in almost every language, from every corner of the world. There was the online persona of “Gord Hotchkiss.” It was a side of me my father-in-law never knew existed. I was deeply embedded in a network of communication, and in part, that network defined me.

I find it (mostly) exhilarating when I meet new people at a conference and they’re already familiar with me because of my online presence. I tend to share a lot about my personal side, because it’s such an integral part of me. As one person said, upon meeting me for the first time, “I feel like I know your wife and kids, because you write about them.” So, my online persona extends to include my family. Through me, they’re developing a virtual presence. At this point, they’re not coming up when they Google themselves, but I assure them it’s only a matter of time.

I’m not sure we’ve really explored the consequences of this shift, but I know it’s earth-shaking in its importance. We are all now producers of content. We can all reach global audiences. We are judged by our thoughts, our observations and our intellectual mettle. We leave a footprint online. Search is the connector that introduces us to our audience.

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press created a quantum change in the society of the 1500s. But there was still a physicality to printing. It consumed resources. It took time. Because of these physical restrictions, publishing evolved into big business, with its own controls and checks and balances. Distribution of one’s views did not come easily. Just ask any author who dreamed of getting on the best-seller list. Today, a blog post can take a few moments and no money. In a few hours, it can be picked up on a search engine. If it happens to rank well for a popular keyphrase, especially one that’s of immediate topical interest, it could attract thousands of readers in a few days.

It’s a sobering thought. Most of us feel in control of our own lives. We can be the person we wish to be. And the people who form opinions of us we usually deal with face to face. But online, people form opinions of you without ever meeting you. Our online personas rush beyond the bounds of our physical world. We hand control over our online persona to people that have no idea who we really are. They blog about us and expand our footstep, adding to the sum definition of who we are, without really knowing us.

In the old days, you could be your own person. Today, you belong to a global community. Anyone could be watching, anytime. And you thought Wisteria Lane was a tough place to keep a secret!