Less Is Way More
The next big thing in the web is not how much but how little. Less is more.
When I was in college I studied architecture and got an A in the class even though it was not my major. I liked the way buildings interacted with the environment and people. Buildings as stories. I enjoy all periods of architecture but Mies Van Der Rohe is one of my favorites.
The essence of great design, whether it is a movie, song, mp3 player or website is simplicity. Enough of enough to be enough and no more. The rococo era of architecture personifies the other extreme, excess for excess sake. Like too much sugar frosting on a cake just because you could. You may have seen examples of rococo buildings with too much
ornamentation on top of ornamentation, oozing out like pimple juice on a whitehead.
The popularity of the Apple iPod is owed to the less is more approach. Get the songs in, find them, play them, adjust volume.
But while the past decade of the web era focused on how big the web was (search engines boast of billions of pages indexed). I typed in the letter ‘a’ into one of them and got this result: Personalized Results 1 – 10 of about 7,690,000,000 for a. (0.16 seconds). Impressive. 7.7 billion instances of the letter ‘a’ referenced on this search engine’s index (I don’t say ‘the web’ since no search engine has the entire web in its index — that’s the myth they like to propagate).
If we deconstruct the above example ‘a’ search here’s what the search engine thinks is important: how many pages and how long it took to give me the answer. It’s like walking into a Chinese restaurant and the waiter telling you there’s rice in 264 dishes when you’re sitting down to order.
The real question nobody has asked about search is “so what?”
So you found 7.7 billion pages in 0.16 seconds. What benefit is that really to me? What value?
Since 2001 when search started to become the dominant on ramp to the web the media and others have been astounded at the notion of search. The magic information box. Enter and it fetches.
We are victims of context. Before the web era we endured libraries and CD-ROMS and micro-fiche. Search did away with that. That is a value for sure, but not unlimited value.
Search is not the web’s be all, end all. It is more like rococo in action. The interface may be streamlined but the results are like a fire hose run amok whipping and shooting water blasts that blind you if hit. Search results are dripping with too much frosting and sugar, along with a dose of Splenda and Sweet ‘N Low for extra sweetness. Too much.
What people really want is the best, not the most.
You could walk into a realtor’s office and say you want to buy some land in a warm climate. Keyword search: warm climate. She may reply: I’ve got 1 million acres for $1 million. Wow, buck an acre. Good deal, right? let’s buy stock in the company that employs the realtor. Wrong. 1 million acres in the middle of the desert. No oil either. Just you sifting through the sand.
Ditto sifting through search results. Page one often has some good results but exactly what, who and where did they come from? How “qualified” are they?
Search operates under the premise of “more is more”.
And it’s wrong. Stock jockeys and a few in Silicon Valley may try and perpetuate the myth of search as the power of the web but what we use as search now will be viewed as shooting needles into haystacks trying to hit something. Random, unqualified, unverified, mostly irreverent.
Information is like a building, it needs to be solid, secure, supported, with just the right amount of light and airiness about it to be the best it can be.