Communications Major

Calls to Congress, Not President-Elect's Tweet, Responsible for Win Against GOP on Ethics Office

Former self-described Google "search girl" and current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says that "the future is personalization...where you're the query." Such searches will take into account all your history and preferences.

As Americans’ modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seem to be changing as well.

Whenever I hear about deals like last week’s Facebook purchase of Instagram for $1 billion, or read a story with a title like “11 Startups That Could Get Bought for $1 Billion Tomorrow” , I get to thinking about the good old days. Web 1.0, and the ability to start shifting a bulk of my research and fact checking work out of the public library and into the home office. All I needed was a PC and a dial-up Internet connection and suddenly I could do twice as much work in half the time.

It was 1995, then 1996. It seemed a new search engine was coming at us every week. Google didn’t exist yet. You had a choice of email providers like AOL offering a way to search. Or you could go with the latest model with a clever logo and promise of getting you closer to what you were looking for – Yahoo!, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista.

In fact, as that decade came to a close and Google became a part of the playing field, the choice of search engines and determining which one had access to the most data is similar to the choice in social networks we are grappling with here in the midst of Web 2.0. In this land of suddenly plenty – which ones will keep us connected to the right people at the right time?

Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds — literally the blink of an eye — is too long, as Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.

A Facebook data scientist has laughed off recent research by Princeton University which claimed that the social network giant would lose 80% of its users in the next few years. According to the model the Princeton researchers used, Princeton University would be extinct by the end of the decade and our entire planet will vanish by 2060. That last prediction is based on declining searches for the word "air" on Google.

Just hours after Instagram, a mobile app that lets users layer pre-programmed filters over their photos to achieve maximum hipness, launched on Google's Android operating system Tuesday, the snark began.

Until then, the 18-month-old app had been exclusive to Apple devices.

"Instagram went from a gated community to section 8 all in 1 day," wrote Twitter user @joelby1328.