Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

It takes a lot to pull me from apathy and back to writing blog entries, but reading Jim Louderback’s article How Location-Based Social Networking Gets Creepy in AdvertisingAge was the 10,000 volt cattle-prod that got my fingers racing.

Subtitled “It’s 9 a.m., Do You Know Who the ‘Mayor’ of Your Kid’s School Is?”, the article’s basic premise is that new social networks can reveal how creepy the people around you are. In the new age of social connectivity and information sharing, you might encounter new information about your neighbors, colleagues, and friends. Quoting from the end of the article:

This tale is, in part, yet another log thrown on the privacy bonfire. But in this case it’s not about Facebook. It’s about locations, kids, parents, safety, and what your combined online persona says about you.

I’m convinced that our school’s “mayor” is a nice, warm and loving father. But from everything I saw that day, he seemed to be a shifty, creepy Texan with an unhealthy obsession with a small-town school on the coast of California.

What happened, according to the article, was that Jim Louderback was dethroned as Foursquare Mayor of the local California “small town” (what does this mean? which town?) school by a stranger. Wondering who might be checking into the same school in the same town, Jim decided to check out his usurper/neighbor. He found out the following things. I feel they are innocuous, but Jim thinks “what we found was concerning:”

• The new mayor a Foursquare pro, more than 40 badges, including Crunked (4+ stops in one night), Player Please (checking in with 3 members of the opposite sex), Animal House (Off the Wagon Appreciates Your Business, COLLEGE), Douchebag (Doublepop that collar son), Hookup (Two different hotels?), and the Super Mayor badge (holding down 10+ mayorships simultaneously)
• “His profile picture was not one to inspire confidence”
• (later) He was actually a parent at our school, and his stepson was in my son’s class.

It’s unreasonable to assume much from the profile of a prolific foursquare user. Drinking, partying, and travel are all acceptable ways to relax in America. We’re a modern jet-setting crowd, and while “work hard, play hard” is a bit tired, it is the millenials’ standard. Nearly anyone older than 16 could have the same lifestyle and carefree attitude that describes a large portion of young America. However, our shoot-first-ask-questions-later author became enraged that a monster like Mr. Foursquare might live/work around his family:

They all painted a plausible impression of someone that I really didn’t want within 500 yards of my son. So I found him on Twitter and sent out a tweet with his handle embedded, wondering publicly if he was a pedophile.

Here’s the exchange between Jim Louderback and cloudwrangler, as it went down on Twitter:

jlouderb: @cloudwrangler, how can you be mayor of my son’s school in Pacifica CA when you live in Austin TX. Are you a pedophile, or is #4sqfu
9:31 PM May 1st via Seesmic

cloudwrangler: @jlouderb I live in SF, my stepdaughter is in class with your son, and I would appreciate you removing this unfounded public accusation.
11:06 PM May 1st via web in reply to jlouderb

cloudwrangler: @jlouderb Also, I know we’ve not had a chance to meet yet, and I would be more than happy to do so soon, perhaps at the open house in May.
11:09 PM May 1st via web in reply to jlouderb

jlouderb: @cloudwrangler Definitely! Was with a friend today and we were wondering who is this weird TX guy, mayor of Ocean Shore. I thought 4sq bug!
3:40 AM May 2nd via Seesmic

Does this seem like an appropriate way to approach a stranger? Would you walk up to someone on the street, and noticing their handlebar mustache, ask them, “With that mustache, I don’t want you hanging around any kids! Get out of here! Are you a pedophile?” Well, you might. But then you’re a conservetard asshole.

There’s a number of troubling fallacies in the reasoning:

• Why does social networking only get creepy/personal/ugly when your children are involved? (the “think of the kids” fallacy)
• Why are strangers to be feared instead of offered hospitality? (the “stranger danger” fallacy)
• Why do you interact with things outside your understanding/comfort zone/personal network with defensiveness/hate/anger? (the “you’re not one of us” fallacy)

This could have gone over much better with this tweet: @Mr. Foursquare Hi, I see you go to the same school as my son! Live around here? We should grab cold ones sometime. Jim, you had a chance to make a friend.

I love the idea behind Cuil, the latest search engine in a long list of failures (Mahalo, Ask, Powerset) to challenge Google. As Mashable explains, they are pulling out all the stops to hit Google from multiple directions across their core search competency:

Enter Cuil, a very serious competitor, packed with ex-Googlers (Tom Costello and Anna Patterson are the backbone of Cuil, and they’ve both worked at Google), and claiming to have the largest index of websites – 120 billion – in the world.

It doesn’t end there: Cuil pulls pretty much every trick in the book. Big claims about the biggest index, privacy concerns (IP addresses of users aren’t saved, making it impossible for a third party to request it from them), semi-semantic approach (Cuil’s engine recognizes the relations between certain words on a web site, which helps it rank pages better). Hell, they even pulled the energy-saving trick: the front page of Cuil is completely black, in contrast to Google’s eye-poking whiteness.

Check out the Slashdottie thread for more discussion. I’m not interested in going there; rather I’m more concerned with how relevant the results from Cuil are, compared to Google, in a stricter context of information retrieval. After all, a search engine is about finding information.

Let’s start with a query “how to rip a dvd” in Cuil and Google:

Cuil on “How To Rip a DVD”

4 of the 9 total results are spam from Ebooksbay. An additional 4 are for converting MP3s. The final result (which is quite spammy) is for ripping DVDs to a variety of formats. Score: 11%.

Google on “How To Rip a DVD”

Google gives you 7 DVD ripping guides, and three spams site of ripping software. Essentially, you have to give it a Score: 100%, since it’s pretty much the baseline in our test. Just based on what I’ve seen so far, this will be a comparison not of relative merits, but of how much less relevant the results from Cuil are compared to Google.

Cuil on “ConcurrentHashMap”

Wait, what is that in the rightmost result!!!? Yes, that winsome young woman is carefully inspecting a ConcurrentHashMap! Ahm, bad image / search results correlations aside, the search listings fail to list the authority Java documentation source (Sun’s website) and instead list 2 mirrors (java 5 and 6), 4 bug reports, 3 mailing list discussions, and 2 random libraries with a similarly named class. Score: 50%.

Google on “ConcurrentHashMap”

Google nicely gives us the Sun Java page as the first result, 2 snippets of code using this class, 6 guides to using concurrent hash maps, a benchmark, one of the same random libraries as Cuil (Oswego), and a different random library (backport-util). I’d give them Score: 80% at this task.

Anyway, I’m getting tired of writing this. Cuil just doesn’t deliver fast, consistent, high-quality search results. The relevance is quite low, in spite of the interface improvements and searching / clustering / recommendation features.

The more I look at visual search engine SearchMe, the more I like it. In a way that text-based search engine Google has never done, SearchMe brings thumbnails to search results without losing any of the textual indicators we need to process relevance. SearchMe is also innovating in clustering search results into categories or topics, something Google has experimented with their sets demo but never implemented into the larger search engine. Perhaps the best way to show you how much more relevant SearchMe can be is through a short example, searching for “Obama.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.