Google is getting ready to roll out some new technology on September 30th. If you missed the Google Wave developer demo back in May 2009, you can watch it here. I think it’s worth viewing, even for non-technical folks. Of course geeks will probably watch it repeatedly for it’s exciting nerd jargon and the rockin references to the 1999 Mike Judge film ‘Office Space’.
Google Wave aims to solve one of the biggest problems on the web
The issue? Tons of data gets published and then some time later these items become frozen out-of-date artifacts that nobody can rely on. So, in tackling this problem, Google is coming up with innovative ways to deal with the stuff that we see in their searches. The goal: to make search returns more useful.
To appreciate how helpful Google Wave will be, think about the difference between data and information. Data can be any kind of input. Facts, figures, pictures, sounds all of these things in a pile, in no particular order. The web, as a collection of billions of disparate pages is not the kind of thing you can pull facts from unless you’ve got a way to sort through it all and get your hands on the reliable stuff. Information, then is data that has been organized, acted upon, or structured in some way to where it becomes meaningful or useful.
To me, the Google Wave is like something you would get if you mixed the best parts of Facebook and Twitter with gmail. You have an email construct that updates in real time and allows you to connect the dots between people, topics, workgroups, and communications. A Wave then, is like an email object that takes on the qualities of social media: it exists in real time, the important stuff gets sifted to the top, you can group, sort and filter; it allows you to collaborate, prioritize and well… hopefully keep your sanity. So yeah, information overload is bad, but data overload can get completely ugly.
The New Google Interface
Next time you Google something, look closely at your search returns and you will notice Google has added three tiny buttons.
The first button is a speech bubble icon. Clicking this button allows you to add a comment to the search return. I hope this feature is not used to leave comments like you might find at YouTube where it’s become another way for Trolls to act belligerent. I have not looked too closely into this. Maybe somebody who reads this blog is more familiar and can leave a comment or an article link.
The second tiny button on the new Google interface is an “Up Arrow”. This is like the Digg “Thumbs Up” or the FriendFeed “Like” feature. Basically it’s a way to indicate that you found the search return to be valid or relevant.
The third button on the new Google interface is the Remove button signified by an X. This button allows you to ‘vote’ to have the page removed from future search results. I have no idea how many clicks it takes to get something voted off the island. It seems like this would be fairly complicated to determine in some cases. After all, one user’s junk could be another user’s treasure. Alas, if you want to know more about this cool new interface, may I suggest you consult Google? But you might want to wait for the release of Google Wave. As of today, if you search using the terms Google Interface New, the search returns an ANCIENT old picture from 2006. So, you see firsthand the problem with the old web and why Google Wave is meant to make these antique, irrelevant documents go away.