Caught Up, or Just Caught?

ANYBODY ELSE AROUND HERE miss Walter Cronkite?

How about Huntley and Brinkley, or Harry Reasoner? Or, for that matter, who misses the 7 o'clock network news on TV?

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate a 24-hour news cycle. I enjoy tuning in CNN at 1:30 a.m. and watching two lawyers argue loudly about the next smart legal maneuver by Scooter Libby or Kevin Federline. But sometimes I find myself longing for the old days when you could set aside a half-hour before dinner and let Walter, Harry or some other kindly current-events uncle fill you in on the day's haps. All the news you needed in one quick dose: a few pictures from a foreign war, some footage of Nixon and Mao pointing at something, maybe a shot of Hank Aaron taking batting practice…and hey, wash up, time for dinner.

Now I live with a constant nagging feeling that I'm missing something — that whatever I give my attention to, there's something better, more relevant or more informative that I could be consuming.

I've rigged my computers at home and work with, by my count, six content-notification systems apiece. I have e-mail accounts that are used for nothing but alerts; they stack up like cordwood in a sidebar on my screen, each with its little time note letting me know that something I might need to look at was posted on a subject two minutes ago, or 25, or two hours ago.

A plug-in at the top of my screen has a dozen icons that light up and jiggle with new content. On a busy news day, it can look like I'm sitting at a pinball machine.

And I've come to hate a mean-spirited little pop-up that appears every other minute to remind me that I've got a new unread blog post to read. Once the level gets above three digits, take the hint already.

Anyone who tries to stay caught up these days faces what psychologist and author Barry Schwartz has termed “chooser's remorse”: the fear that out of a super-abundance of content, you haven't selected the best or most pertinent material. You can choose from among three kinds of peanut butter and feel you've done well. But faced with 50 varieties, who's going to be sure that they're not settling for less than the best?

We're time-poor and running an attention deficit — and the Internet is not helping. With the rise of blogs and social networks like My Space and the continuing move of local businesses onto the Web, content pages are growing faster than ever. Web monitor Netcraft found more than 80 million sites on the Web in its April 2006 monthly survey. That's an increase of 3.1 million domain names over March's results. Basically it means that the Web has doubled in size since it hit the 40 million mark in April 2003.

That overabundance is having an effect on our use of search, too. A recent study by Jupiter Research and iProspect found that 62% of users click on a result within the first page; that's up from only 48% who hit on a first-page result in 2002. Only 10% of users today are willing to look beyond three result pages for what they want, compared with 19% four years ago. About two in five users today don't go any further than the first results page before determining if their search was a success or failure; a bit more than one in four users said the same thing in '02.

And yet we regularly get searches on Google, Yahoo! and the rest that serve us 10 or 12 results pages. Sometimes that low number is a tease; there can be another 20 pages hiding behind that first helping.

So the drive is on for added relevance in both content and search, as users and Web operators strive to shelter from this content avalanche. For Webmasters, personalization solutions like the one recently released by mSpoke are offering to let them “learn” their customers' interests so they can serve up more relevant content — and of course, more appealing and better targeted ads — with each visit. “No information overload, no irrelevant ad clutter” is mSpoke's value proposition for consumers. It's a consummation devoutly to be wished if it catches on with Web sites and advertisers.

And the search engines, after years of touting their inclusiveness, seem to be acknowledging that their mountains of results may actually hinder some searches and are trying to turn more into “answer engines.” Both Google and Yahoo! have instituted “answers” features that let searchers get their informational questions answered by real live human beings. In Yahoo!'s case, it's done for free by other registered members of the Yahoo! community; at Google, the questions are put out to bid among a defined group of “experts”, with prices based on the question's complexity.

Ask.com, which relaunched sans butler and with a new name in February, has made a TV star of its Binoculars feature that lets users mouse over many search results and get a thumbnail-sized peek at the page behind the link, the better to judge if it's the kind of site they hoped to find.

At this writing Google appears to be experimenting with something similar called “expanded results,” courtesy of a technology it bought in April from a Ph.D. student in New South Wales, Australia. (Google hired the 26-year-old developer, too.) Reported sightings of this test are rare, but they seem to involve putting an icon next to selected results. Users can click on the icon and see a paragraph of text from the Web page, an image, a few related links and a “search this site” box, to let them decide more quickly if that's the result they're looking for.

It might be a boon to us harassed general searchers, or it might be another toggle that gets a small following among the digerati but little mass adoption. Personally, I find the mouse-over capability of Binoculars to be one of its most appealing traits, because it lets me discard some results without any clicking or even much reading.

In any case, online marketers will need to be aware of the appeal such personalization efforts at search engines or Web sites might have for users — and the impact this work might have on how their organic rankings drive visitors to their sites. The iProspect study showed that it's more important than ever for Web DMers to get their links high up in natural search. More personalized content, or user tools that help focus searches, could mean a much more fragmented market for their Web sites and sponsored listings.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 1,473 blog posts to read.