I’m sure that somebody has told you the story of how difficult is to find a needle in a hay stack. It’s a classical example of how search engines work. Multiple bots, crawlers and teraflop engines are constructed to help you in performing the web search. But do you still have a difficult task of finding the best website for whatever? Do you end up with some website that should be ranked #1 million? It is because there are so many websites, that search engines don’t always know which one is the best. It’s not one needle anymore, its millions of them, but only 1 is the one you want. What about the process of finding that perfect needle?
Before we discuss the proper way of doing this, I suggest to consider a brief look at small portion of general statistics:
-- There are 108,810,358 distinct websites on internet according to the Netcraft Web Server 2007 Survey .
-- Web pages per website: 273 (rounding to the nearest whole number) This means you have 29,705,130,200 web pages available on-line
-- There are 1,086,250,903 of internet users according to http://www.internetworldstats.com
-- According to Nielsen/Netratings, an average person visits 1446 websites per month. (1446/30) = 48.2* 1,086,250,903 = 52,357,293,525. This is the number of webpages visited daily.
-- There are 585 search engines and 65 bookmark managers are currently present on internet according to the Yahoo Directory.
-- There are 1750 unique messages are getting posted to major blog sites every second. The entire day brings this number to 15,120,000!
-- There are 6000 different languages human beings are currently using on this planet.
-- 19 major world religions are subdivided into multiple other religions. 34,000 separate Christian groups have been identified in the world. Probably, there are more then 150, 000 separate religious groups around the world. This brings totally huge number of different views and ideas. And this diversity is definitely getting reflected on the everyday changing web.
Looking at these numbers I can't help the feeling that I might have screwed them up for a million or two… However the general picture is there. There are a lot of websites, and not so many good ones.
There is only one proven way of dealing with such a diversity of points of view and information sources .
Here is where I’m going to describe how it’s done on my favorite Visual Web Index site: http://www.elonta.com
The way how it’s they want to do it is to create your own personalized web index: a special list of websites which are proven to be good and this list is organized your own way. They even have a big list of popular websites ready for you.
They are still in their BETA version, so the personalized part of it is not done, but they still have a huge selection of pre-picked websites.
All websites are presented by their own graphical icons. Visual presentation of sites and how they are positioned on your page makes the whole Web Index experience much easier and user friendly.
Why visual representation is so important? As it’s described in research papers of Dr. N. Stevenson of Delft University of Technology , Netherlands, - “visual representation is improving our brain throughput by almost by 70% in most cases. An average person with a totally regular IQ shows amazing results by simple switching from an ordinary text based data handling methods to advanced graphical symbols and associations.“ Identity design is one of the most popular topics in the design industry. Some studies show that 65 to 70% of all business decisions are based on visual impressions and associations.
Simply, our own brain “graphics card” is a very important component of the “processing unit” called the human being.
The principles of design suggest effective and impressive ways to arrange text and graphics on the page as well as the arrangement of logos. Generally, all the principles of design apply to any piece you may create. How you apply those principles of design determines how attractive it appears.
Different ways of visual representation in web industry are already finding there own resolution.
Here is a good example: a visual search engine http://www.like.com created by Riya Inc. Like.com is a new kind of visual search engine. They look at and inside the image, not only at the text.
Riya also has a personal search service that does face and text recognition in your photos. You can use the face and text recognition technology to:
• Train the system to recognize the main characters in the story of your life.
• Share photos with friends and family.
Visual and graphical data representation on web search engines and index sites is gaining more and more attention. The new Visual Web Index site http://www.elonta.com is a very good example of such an important process.
I am going to continue analysis of the major visual search and visual sorting trends in some of my next articles.
Graphically yours,
Acu Strata
About the Author
Acu Strata is a electronic engineer with 12 published patents in different areas of internet circuit design and communication systems. His start page is currently: http://www.elonta.com
