The Wisdom of Crowds: Pulling the Long Tail?
One thing I don't get about the Long Tail theory: in his book, Anderson writes that the Tail continues to grow fatter (that is, each niche product is being consumed by more and more people) because 1) distribution costs have sunk to nothing online, allowing individual merchants (people selling obscure things on eBay) to reach an audience no smaller than Wal-Mart's, and 2) various technologies are driving people to these niches more effectively than ever before, exposing consumers to tons of new, obscure stuff.
Anderson writes: "This can take the form of anything from Google's wisdom-of-crowds search to iTunes' recommendations, along with word-of-mouth, from blogs to customer reviews."
Now, I am okay with most of that. Yes, the proliferation of super-specialized blogs means there are that many more platforms from which people can find new things to be interested in. And yes, you can get iTunes to give you recommendations in the narrowest of sub-genres with ever increasing precision thanks to the streams of user input that continuously shape their catalog.
Generally speaking, I agree that niches are easier to reach than they used to be, and it makes sense that their increased visibility makes for a more substantial population of consumers gnawing on the end of the Tail.
However: it seems somewhat unfair to say that Google's search technology—which encourages users to visit the ten websites most frequently visited by other users in search of the same thing—unequivocally nurtures the Long Tail in this way. Certainly, Google makes niches easier to explore by providing newbies with tons of information—i.e., it used to be really hard to orient oneself within a tiny, unfamiliar subculture, but now we can just ask Google and get a pretty accurate/informative understanding of any culture system regardless of its size—but doesn't the "wisdom-of-crowds" thing also have the effect of making the popular more popular and leave the unknown unknown?
That is to say: sure, a search for "third wave ska" will pretty reliably guide you towards Less Than Jake, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, etc., but what about all the bands on page 10 of the results? Won't they continue to languish in obscurity, since no one ever gets that far when they're searching? I'm not actually so worried about ska, but it seems to me that at a certain level, the wisdom-of-crowds technology quite systematically hides prevents users from seeing certain niches, rather than helping them get exposed to things they would never have heard of or had access to 20 years ago.
A non-ska-related example of what I mean: imagine a person who is looking to buy some car insurance. He/she searches for "car insurance," and Google spits out a list of 10 companies: Geico, Progressive, State Farm, a couple other big ones. But what if there were a million other car insurance companies, among them one that would serve this particular individual better than any of the others? Isn't the whole principle of the Long Tail that all of us now gets exactly what we want instead of conforming to a narrow handful of available options?
I understand that people who know exactly what they want—and know the search terms they must type in order to properly describe it&dasmh; can use Google to find what they're looking for. But the wisdom-of-crowds algorithm (the thing that made Google so revolutionary) does not serve the people who don't know those things. In other words, it doesn't help drive demand down the Tail at all. That seems important, since one of the foundational observations Anderson makes about the Tail is that it gives everyone access to niches, instead of just the specialists who have the resources and expertise to pursue them.
...Keyhole, thoughts?
Anderson writes: "This can take the form of anything from Google's wisdom-of-crowds search to iTunes' recommendations, along with word-of-mouth, from blogs to customer reviews."
Now, I am okay with most of that. Yes, the proliferation of super-specialized blogs means there are that many more platforms from which people can find new things to be interested in. And yes, you can get iTunes to give you recommendations in the narrowest of sub-genres with ever increasing precision thanks to the streams of user input that continuously shape their catalog.
Generally speaking, I agree that niches are easier to reach than they used to be, and it makes sense that their increased visibility makes for a more substantial population of consumers gnawing on the end of the Tail.
However: it seems somewhat unfair to say that Google's search technology—which encourages users to visit the ten websites most frequently visited by other users in search of the same thing—unequivocally nurtures the Long Tail in this way. Certainly, Google makes niches easier to explore by providing newbies with tons of information—i.e., it used to be really hard to orient oneself within a tiny, unfamiliar subculture, but now we can just ask Google and get a pretty accurate/informative understanding of any culture system regardless of its size—but doesn't the "wisdom-of-crowds" thing also have the effect of making the popular more popular and leave the unknown unknown?
That is to say: sure, a search for "third wave ska" will pretty reliably guide you towards Less Than Jake, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Reel Big Fish, etc., but what about all the bands on page 10 of the results? Won't they continue to languish in obscurity, since no one ever gets that far when they're searching? I'm not actually so worried about ska, but it seems to me that at a certain level, the wisdom-of-crowds technology quite systematically hides prevents users from seeing certain niches, rather than helping them get exposed to things they would never have heard of or had access to 20 years ago.
A non-ska-related example of what I mean: imagine a person who is looking to buy some car insurance. He/she searches for "car insurance," and Google spits out a list of 10 companies: Geico, Progressive, State Farm, a couple other big ones. But what if there were a million other car insurance companies, among them one that would serve this particular individual better than any of the others? Isn't the whole principle of the Long Tail that all of us now gets exactly what we want instead of conforming to a narrow handful of available options?
I understand that people who know exactly what they want—and know the search terms they must type in order to properly describe it&dasmh; can use Google to find what they're looking for. But the wisdom-of-crowds algorithm (the thing that made Google so revolutionary) does not serve the people who don't know those things. In other words, it doesn't help drive demand down the Tail at all. That seems important, since one of the foundational observations Anderson makes about the Tail is that it gives everyone access to niches, instead of just the specialists who have the resources and expertise to pursue them.
...Keyhole, thoughts?
posted by Leon at 4:59 PM
1 Comments:
I do have some thoughts! :(
First, I think you're slightly wrong about the nature of Google's algorithm. As I understand it, the rankings reflect a site's popularity with other *web sites* more than they reflect a site's popularity with Google users, although I'm sure they adjust for the latter. Sites linked to by other sites win; isolated sites without many inbound links lose.
You're probably right that Google might create a bit of a snowball effect -- the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. But the question is: what's your comparison point? Google surely isn't WORSE at bringing attention to obscure thingies than our old information battlespace (;)) was, and while very simplistic searches done by idiots might conceal a lot of stuff, I think quite a lot of basic searches will yield all sorts of weird riches. Just think about people googling their name or the names of their friends/enemies -- maybe there are various hits form like obscure message boards, local newspapers, etc.
Also, on his Long Tail blog, Chris Anderson said a kind of interesting think about how Google creates a "long tail of time." To some extent, Google keeps alive stuff that was once totally transient, like little crappy Indy music reviews by certain people. These fossils could pop up on someone's screen at any time; Google's stockpile of pages never gets any smaller (I don't think). So as long as things don't get deleted off servers, they can continue to receive drips and drabs of traffic and retain relevancy even years and years after their origination. I know that I've occasionally looked at like programming tutorials or whatevs that were way old but remained up on someone's site; Google brought me thither, leading me hand in hand down the big fat ass of time.
And my main complaint about that book (which I haven't read) -- and this is a complaint you seem to allude to at the beginning of your post -- is that the goddamn tails aren't any longer, really. They're "fatter" or, more politely, "taller" or "thicker" (sexier). The tail of a normal distribution is infinitely long (can't get any longer than that!!!!); the issue is that it gets infinitely SKINNY too.
Also all the fake math that the book allegedly has with log-log plots proving "power law" relationships is, reliable sources tell me, pretty much horseshit.
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