Somebody once said that the World Wide Web is like the biggest library in the world — too bad all the books are on the floor.
That quote is from a long time ago in Internet years; improvements in search engine technology have made that library a lot easier to negotiate.
But apparently our techno overlords think we still have info needs they haven’t met. An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) by Kevin Delaney reports on a new trend in in web search engine services: for a nominal fee, you can pose questions directly to other human beings.
The idea is that this will work better than typing in a bunch of keywords and hoping your question will be answered by some web page that sproings onto your screen.
After giving an overview of a couple of these services, Delaney looks at some questions and answers from Yahoo’s Answers.
The first example question he looks at is “What part of the body contains the most bones?”
Then he looks at the answers users had given to the question.
They are . . . wrong.
lol
Fortunately, the service uses a wikipedia-like self-correction mechanism — users can also vote on the answer selections, and assuming some votes are cast by people who know what they’re talking about, the most accurate answers will rise to the top.
Still, it touches on what is, for me, an intriguing question about the Internet as an information resource. How do you decide what to trust, when you don’t have a personal relationship with the person offering the information? When you meet someone face-to-face, you’re able to pick up all kinds of clues about his intelligence and character and whether he’s telling the truth.
Granted, con artists and their ilk can manipulate these clues to some degree. And even intelligent people with impeccable characters can give terrible advice.
But on the ‘net, we not only have con artists and intelligent bunglers. We also have zillions of other advice-givers, about whom we know absolutely nothing.
So how do we know, when we type a question, that we’re not about to get Cliff Clavin’ed?
Technorati Tags: Internet, quality of information
Posted originally at KirstenMortensen.com : The Internet's Cliff Clavin Conundrum and republished here by the author
