9. Spatial Metaphors and Bing’s Informational Architecture
When reading Salvo and Rosinkski’s “ Information Design: From Authoring Text to Architecting Virtual Space” I was struck, and somewhat entertained, by their “fanciful” vision of searching the World Wide Web for broccoli and receiving results of the most ideal species: results based on temporal space, familial space, and, inevitably, ideology (123). In their discussion of search engines, Salvo and Rosinski write of Google and Yahoo!’s irrealizable attempts to “index the entire web,” (121), but as of their publication, from what I can tell, Microsoft’s Bing had not yet been developed. Using their spatial metaphors, I thought it might be interesting to see how these terms can be applied to this dark horse(ish) of a search engine
For me (and for reasons here applicable), where Bing truly differs from engines like Google or Yahoo! is not in its ability to render results that are apt using complex algorithms or metadata buried deep within the code of a given web page, but through social networking (typically Facebook) and relying on the help of others, usually those you know, to help find the information you need. In column ⅓ web results are listed, in the middle column are relevant ads, and most importantly, the last column takes stock of your friends’ relevant interests (given the particular search) or if they have answered a question about the search somewhere, usually within the Quora database. In this light, Bing capitalizes on explicit uses of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Using a homogenous group (all members in this group can be categorized under ‘friends’), an almost inconceivable amount of results, heterogenous of course, are refined and designed to produce better results. Also, the fine granularity of a search may be made more course through Bing’s rightmost column.
On the idea of Mapping, Salvo and Rosinski write that, “Becoming a mapmaker means selecting and arranging preexisiting information in order to assist a user in learning something or accomplishing some task, often with visual extra-textual display of the data” (114) and that the act of map making necessarily asks its maker to make (unconscious choices about orders and hierarchies. In this light, the extra-textual element of Bing almost makes that perhaps unconscious chore extraneous.
Finally, if the concept of the folksonomy, the “practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content,” relies on data and metadata to architecting a productive information design, Bing seems to be the epitome. Its metadata is most definitely created “not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content” (118). By using what is listed in the rightmost and leftmost columns, results become imbricated (depending on how many friends you have, what their interests are, and ultimately, what you search for) and “smart”.
So, it seems like Salvo and Rosinksi would be tickled about Bing; its ambience creates a human agency through social media that other search engines have not yet realized. They write, “By staying engaged in information design considerations, technical communicators will be well poised to help usher in and shape a potential future of ambient contextual information and retrieval in the age of digital literacy” (104). Bing seems to by a step forward in a new ‘information design consideration.’ For the record, however, I’m not a Bing user. Sometimes in life, you need to disgust yourself and towards that pursuit digitally seek out whatever image, video, whatever that will suffice. I don’t necessarily want my friends to see that I’ve searched for the URL of “hairy cowboy butts” with which to change a friend’s homepage.