Stuff gets filtered to suit our particular likes and dislikes all the time.  It’s why I don’t get any catalogs for fly-fishing lures or (alas) equestrian apparel.  Once I randomly got put on a list for private-plane owners, which was fun for a time (and then slightly depressing).  I have long appreciated this filtering for the recycling-center trips it saves me.

However, last week Sacha Dichter wrote an interesting blog post about information filtering that kind of disturbed me.  In the article, Dichter discussed a related phenomenon that concerned him:  news outlets and information sources becoming so polarized that we have to remind ourselves to specifically seek out opinions that differ from ours in order to be well-rounded people.  We need to purposefully consume sources that strive for balance or seek out those that challenge our thinking or opinions. It’s really good advice.

It wasn’t what Dichter wrote that disturbed me, though; it was this jaw-dropping TED Talk by Eli Pariser that he embedded, talking about online filtering:

If you can, and especially if you are a professional researcher, please take nine short, engaging minutes to watch this video.

How do we avoid missing the important stuff?

It’s not like tailoring information is new.  But for those of us who provide information to others for a living, the reality that our web search results are abridged based on what we’ve clicked on previously should make us extra diligent.  What are we missing?  And how can we avoid myopic results when what we hope to provide is the best-researched information possible?

HAL may have thought of itself as incapable of error but we know how well that turned out
for Dave and the rest of the crew.

A few suggestions

I say this a lot because it bears repeating: if you want the most complete results when you search, you *have* to use more than one search engine.  Search engines index many different things and many things differently.

Also, for all kinds of reasons it’s a good idea to empty your cache/browsing history and delete cookies frequently.  If you can’t remember to do it every day, set a reminder to do it every Friday at quitting time.  Besides unloading your computer hard drive of a lot of junque that you just don’t need clogging up space on your hard drive, there will be that many fewer sites tracking what you are doing online…and remembering those preferences to edit what you are seeing.

For the casual searcher, the rewards of filtering are probably as many as its penalties.  For professional searchers, though, having the full array of options to choose from is key.

When my nephew Jason was a little kid, he could drive me crazy with his questions.  He’d start with “What is that man doing?” “He’s digging a hole.”

“Why?” “Well, he’s helping build a bridge.”

“Why?” “The old one washed out.”

“Why?” “Because there was a mudslide.”

“Why?”

Before I knew it, I was trying to explain global weather patterns and El Niño…and quickly getting w-a-y out of my depth.  (Of course, this was before iPhones; I think I’d last a few more rounds now).

“Why?” is the question

In fundraising research, we need to be like four-year-olds every time we do our work.  Every single time we come up against information that doesn’t quite make sense.

Why does that couple belong to a golf club on an island off the coast of Georgia? They live in New York.  Their second home is in Colorado.  What’s going on?  Is their capacity to give larger than we think?

Why is our alumnus not responding to a 45-page proposal we labored over for two solid weeks?  It was a sure thing – he asked us to put it together!

Why did a distinguished business leader suddenly change her giving priorities ten years ago?  It used to be the environment, now she’s into medical research.  Will she give to us?

Something’s just…off

When we research, facts that are asymmetrical should grab our attention and bug us like a stone in our sandal.  We’re not just finding information, plonking it down in a report and throwing it over the transom in a factory line.  Yawn.  Another report done.  Next.

The couple belongs to the island golf club because their third home is there, held in trust in a compound the wife’s grandfather, an oil baron, established.  Fortunately on its website the golf club’s newsletter mentioned the great season-opening party at the couple’s house, with photos of the art collection and the back-story of the oil baron.

The alumnus mentioned in a newspaper interview years ago that he is dyslexic.  Our alum hasn’t read the proposal and didn’t feel comfortable mentioning it.

The prospect’s sister died of a hereditary disease 10 years ago.  In a video interview she discusses how she’s motivated to honor her sibling and find a cure for herself and her family.

These are three real examples* where asking “why?” made a make-or-break difference in our client’s success with engaging a donor.  None of the answers were available on the three main search engines – they were found in deep web sources.

Every piece of research you do could make that difference

We have to keep at it ~ to keep asking “why?”  Yes, it’s a lot more work, but it makes work a lot more interesting.  We researchers live for that “Eureka!” moment, and there’s no better feeling than being part of a gift that transforms a donor, an organization and the people or cause we serve.

*Details changed to preserve anonymity

The Washington Post ran an article on Jan 30^th by Michael Rosenwald highlighting the increasing amount of spam on Google.  Spammers have figured out a way to cheat the Google system and are now bringing it direct to you and me.  It’s clogging up the works and many are starting to worry that Google isn’t taking the issue seriously enough.

How the spammers do it

1.      Content farms – businesses created specifically to generate cheap and filling answers to popular search strings – are increasingly padding out the results.

According to Rosenwald, websites like eHow hire freelancers to write how-to articles on a wide variety of topics.  The sites work hard to optimize the page content so that they get pushed to the top of search results, and because we trust Google’s algorithms to give us good hits, we click the link.  And when we click the link, we’ve reinforced to Google that that link is what we’re looking for – Google ranks web pages in part based on how many click-throughs it gets.  Once we actually see the page, we realize it’s crap, but now we’re there, we’ve committed.  We’ve clicked.  Crap.

2.      Nickel-a-clickers – People that are paid to click links to bring a web page higher in the rankings.

Through employment matchup services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, spammers hire cheap labor to click on links in order to make their site seem more relevant.  Every time the clickers click they get five cents, or whatever the agreed-on rate is.  In order to earn a decent return, they have to click a lot of hotlinks.  I can’t imagine the boredom that entails, but I suppose it’s pretty easy work.

I’d never heard of Mechanical Turk, so I thought I’d have a look-see.  One of the jobs on offer: “CopyEditing and Logically Filling up of Blanks for Recipe Database.”  Job description: “Check for grammer errors.”  Oh good.  Final comment on the job from the employer: “It doesn’t have to be factually correct. As long as the details seems plausible and logical it is fine.” Well, there’s another reason for sticking with reliable ol’ Epicurious.

Big deal, there’s more spam in Google results.  Whatever.

You might say that now, but if spammers are enlisting armies of cheap labor to scam the system, Google’s in big trouble.  Because if we all get fed up, there are several other big engines ready and waiting for the influx of search émigrés.  And Google will be another name like Netscape or Northern Light that you think “Oh yeah! I used to use that all the time!”

And it means trouble for us, too, because some of the pages you click through to are going have more and more distasteful things on them.  And like bedbugs they could start creeping onto your hard drive and lurk there.

What lurks beneath the surface?

Lurking things?  Eww.  Are there options?

Alternatives to Google include Bing, Blekko, and Exalead, just to name a few.  Here at HBG, we check more than one search engine for every search we do and you might want to consider making it a habit too, if you aren’t already.

Here’s another reason why you might want to use more than one engine: studies in recent years by researchers at Penn State, the University of Kashmir, metasearch engine Dogpile and others have shown repeatedly that information overlap between search engines is very low, sometimes as little as 1% in the first page of returned results.  You get a stronger variety of results if you cast your net wider.

[An interesting sidenote here: search guru Danny Sullivan posted an article on the Search Engine Land website yesterday titled “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results.”  Apparently Google set up a sting operation recently to prove that Bing has been lurking over their shoulders and copying search results.  Sullivan’s article has pictorial evidence and everything.  Will Bing just clone Google’s results, spam and all?  I sure hope not.]

And finally, consider this: when you search Google or any search engine, you’re looking at a static database of web pages that were scanned in days, weeks or perhaps even months ago.  Which is why sometimes when you click a link you won’t find the word you were looking for.  The page was updated in the interim between when it was saved in the search engine’s database and when you clicked the link.  One search engine may have cataloged a site yesterday and another last month.  Or last year.  For freshness, reliability and completeness, it just pays to use more than one search engine.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Google.  But this spam thing is starting to bug me.  Are you concerned?  Or is this much ado about nothing?