Embracing Chaos

A trend in modern successful websites is the democratization of information and decision making. The so-called wisdom of the crowds is at the heart of what makes a web 2.0 company successful. I’m going to compare how three companies have democratized the process of making product development decisions. Amazon makes extensive use of so-called A/B testing to try out new UI’s and optimize the user flow. This works very well for them because their end goal is very well defined: they want people to buy stuff. They are facing a very hard optimization problem, but their objective function is clear…

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First, I’d like to welcome everybody landing here after searching for something on Google. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I know Google has been crawling my site nearly since its launch, and I’ve been passively wondering when would this site show up in Google’s search index. It’s been in Yahoo and MSN for ages, and getting more and more links from high profile sites all the time. Well I just got the answer: as soon as I gave Google money. Surprised? As a birthday present to myself, I bought a few adwords like: Your Brain in a…

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Remember what internet search was like back in the pioneer days — say 1998 or 1999? There were lots of bad ones out there, but I’ll talk about three representative ones. There were lots of page-search engines along the lines of Alta Vista. They crawled the web and indexed the contents of each web page. They would try to figure out which web page best matched your search keywords based entirely on the contents of the pages themselves. This didn’t work very well since spammers could fill their pages with keywords they liked that didn’t necessarily add any value to…

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