Big Fish; Small Net

The Catch is Small: Confusion within a shrinking net

Searches online, whether a name, place, historical event and so forth inevitably lead you to Wikipedia. Unnerving is its position as a seemingly ‘all-purpose’ and oracle like information source you have only to type ‘frog’, ‘giant’, ‘Tokyo’ into a search engine and up pops the same source.

I have recently criticised Andrew Keen for his dreary vision of Web 2.0 as permeated by the passive and mindless masses consuming and creating information in the same way, on the same pages and probably using the same keystrokes. The catch of new streams of information is something that should be celebrated, and any means that allows for people to become enthusiastic and share across the board knowledge is a wonderful thing. However, such fishing of information and insight knowledge is under threat from the ‘giants’ of information sourcing.

According to the Technology Guardian July 2007 Google now handles 65% of all website searches. Add to this the domination of information trawlers such as Wikipedia and we have a World Wide Web shrinkage problem. Information is in the hands of the Big Three: Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo! which direct an array of information queries in the same way. Rather than broadening the scope of information reach and depth these remain bound to dominate search results where the already Big fish get BIGGER.

I had hoped that Web 2.0 would bring forth a new optimisation and widen the net for information where increasingly nuanced readerships and viewerships would have a chance to be caught amongst the mega-catch of the Big Three. However, it appears that I must give Andrew Keen his dues as Web 2.0 seems to be following the inevitable pattern of growth that we have all become familiar with as part of a globalised economy. Homogeneity is dominating; the largest sites are securing their command and hook through expanded advertisement revenue (yes sadly even Facebook has succumbed to this ploy) as well as the buying up of smaller sites to continue to widen their lead.

The tripping point would be a switch from reliance on the big fish of information that may trigger new streams as users switch from one set to the other. Perhaps those consigned to the periphery should celebrate their uniqueness, as an unfished source, swimming against the tide of en-masse information.