Robert Scoble has a very interesting post today about personalization and google. He was getting his search result pages in Spanish because he was probably traveling to a Spanish speaking country.

I very strongly believe in personalization and what is can do for us (the users) if done right. The problem is that too many times services like google (amazon, netflix, etc) focus on very wrong parameters instead of things that should matter most for the users.

This is my story: Last month I placed an order for 4 books in amazon.com. My last order at amazon web store was back in 2003. Logging in with my account after almost 4 years, I was faced with a link on top of my page:

Hello [my name]. We have recommendations for you.

Clicking it, I was sent to a page where a message on the top said something like (I missed the chance to capture it):

Sorry [my name]. We have no recommendations for you today.

:)... and the rest of the page was full of useless gifts and other items for me to buy. Isn’t it a bit stupid that amazon gave me the link for recommended items before checking their database to see if any existed for me?

I continued shopping, found a book I wanted to place on my shopping cart, and a fancy message appeared on top of the page:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (Some restrictions apply)
Make sure to select FREE Super Saver Shipping as your shipping speed at checkout.

VERY NICE! I clicked on "Some restrictions apply" (smaller font size link). A page full of legal jargon appeared. A couple of page-downs revealed the truth:

Applies to U.S. delivery addresses in the 50 states only, including Alaska and Hawaii. Geographic shipping restrictions may apply to particular products; for example, some Tools & Hardware items may not be shipped to Alaska and Hawaii using FREE Super Saver Shipping.

I wonder... How difficult is it for amazon to check my GeoIP or my VISA billing and shipping address, only to see that I live in Europe?

Ok, so let’s say I live in Europe but I am on vacations in the USA and want to shop from amazon. This would make me eligible for super free saving. It would be a great waste if I missed this offer, so amazon thinks that "free shipping" must always be displayed. That’s fine. There is a way for me to escape the hustle clicking the link and being faced with all this legal jargon, by having a link that said:

Your order qualifies for free shipping! (For U.S. shipping addresses only. Some restrictions apply)

Having the best personalization algorithm in the word, while making me wonder helpless around amazon’s pages (full of literally hundreds of links) is crazy!

Badly designed pages, is another thing. I believe amazon has got it all wrong with the design lately. It has become a store full of cluttered pages with information and links everywhere, confusing me more than helping me. But I’ll leave this for a future post.

Scoble’s story and mine prove that many times we see the tree but miss the forest. I really strongly believe that the future of the web lies in personalization (some will call it web 3.0 I guess). But searching for Chinese restaurants does not make me a Chinese speaker.

Labels: amazon, google, personalization, recommendations

For quite some time now, Google has focused in on-line security. One major goal to achieve is identify potentially harmful sites and report them to the users before they visit them. To do that, a link is displayed in the search results page under suspicious pages saying "this site may harm your computer".

Shelley Powers wonders on her blog:

Of course, then that begs the question: how accurate is Google's algorithm when we can't, yet again, see what factors it uses on which to base its decision? There's a major difference between a site having low page rank, and marking a site as potentially harmful.

It's common knowledge that google can destroy (or severely harm!) your web business in seconds just by lowering your PageRank. Now imagine labelling your site as potentially dangerous for the users. Just marking it as harmful could already be a huge damage for your web business. But it doesn't stop there. G almost completely eliminates the possibility a user ignores the warning and visits your site by clicking on Google's result page. To actually visit a site that google thinks wants to harm you, you have to copy and paste the url from google's warning page to the browser's location bar (by the way, a very large number of web users have no idea what a location bar is!)


Two weeks ago, I captured a photo of google's result page identifying Paul Graham's blog at infogami as a site that may harm your computer!!!




This lasted for at least 3 more days after I noticed it. It is now fixed. This is pretty crazy. By examining Paul's blog source code, you can see it's only pure html and text! Text about startups, web businesses, acquisitions, money, life, etc. No weird javascript, annoying pop-ups or redirects.

Google is fine tuning a lot of things daily in their search engine that almost nobody notices. I only noticed this was corrected rather quickly because I was checking it every day.

But I couldn't help but wonder what a false positive would mean if it happened to a small struggling to succeed tech povera start-up.

Labels: blog, google, Graham, harmful, Paul, security