Written by Hithesh Shaji
February 4, 2022
In the early days of the internet, lists and wikis were used to find information. These informational artifacts contained intentional content alongside other relevant information and were hosted at a URL. Users defined their intentions on these static pages, echoing the print world by writing them down. However, unlike physical print, anyone from anywhere in the world could access these pages. There was no need for face-to-face conversations or sending physical documents to convey one’s intent. Nor was it necessary to print multiple copies and distribute them across different regions. Instead, a single online copy could be accessed by anyone.
This was a novel way of organizing both information and intention. However, it introduced a natural challenge: how would others find these pages? One solution was to share the link directly with people you knew. But there were limits—both in the number of people you could reach and, more importantly, in reaching those you didn’t know.
To address this, users categorized their pages or listed them as answers to questions relevant to the communities they cared about. The more people who used these lists, the more likely others would discover their pages. The lists themselves, however, did not understand the content or purpose of the pages. It was up to the list curator to decide if a page was appropriate and to categorize or link it accordingly. This method of discovering intent was rooted in categorization and linking.
Search engines gave users a way to ask for the page that may meet your intention by searching if the information it had on the page contains relevant words in your query. Google ranked the pages according to the collective intelligence of whether other people found the page useful. This sort of intention discovery is through searching for page based on collective relevance.
Unlike search engines, where the user sought out the information, either through curated lists or search results. Social media inverts this process by surfacing information through social connections and algorithmic recommendations, based on what people in your network or larger communities are sharing. You don’t always actively search for information; it finds you through your network’s activity or personalized feeds.