Hunting and gathering on Amazon
Last week, in an article entitled Discovery: The Anti-Search, David Berkowitz described the trend towards greater integration of discovery in a user’s search experience:
Through discovery, when you read your favorite newspaper online, you’re presented with a wealth of links from around the Web that should be of interest to you, including other articles, related books or products, or video clips, whether or not you’d expect them to be directly relevant. Amazon.com does this regularly, such as when it told me that customers who bought the Black & Decker 3.4 PS550B Handsaw also bought a 5-pound bag of Haribo Gummi Bears and the movie “Borat.”
Berkowitz rightly notes that discovery can’t replace search—they’re more effective together, like hunting and gathering—but that it absolutely can enhance search, in his word, ’serendipitously’.
What a glorious word, ’serendipitously’. It fairly rolls off the tongue. What’s so beautiful about it is how it niftily combines an element of happenstance with a portion of positive fortune, and that’s exactly what Berkowitz is pointing at here: you shouldn’t just stumble on random sites, but on sites that happen to be specifically interesting to you.
In the early days of the Internet, everything was so new that it all seemed serendipitous, like the old saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. As we continue to grow in our experience, though, we need ever greater depth if we want to retain that wide-eyed amazement. The original Godzilla is fun to watch now, but if we want to believe in the special effects, we need Peter Jackson.
In the case of Amazon’s handsaw/Gummi Bear/Borat combination, the algorithms are working purely on historical statistics of other users. Surely, they reason, if one person bought our handsaw and then our mockumentary, someone else will be interested in the same combination. And, like those early movies, the initial results have been impressive. If Amazon doesn’t get it right, you give a giggle or ignore it and move on. If they nail it, though, you can’t believe it: “How did they know I love Gummi Bears? They must really care about me!”
They’re bound to nail it sometimes, because it’s not unusual for people to make similar purchase combinations. Surely, though, you know someone who shares your love for handtools but not much else.
This is where companies like VortexDNA come in, allowing serendipity to occur not based a single instance of external behavior, but rather on an expression of who you are. Maybe 100 people who bought the saw also bought the Gummi Bears, but only two of them share your core purpose and values. At the same time, 40 people who are aligned with who you really are bought a Donna Summers CD. VortexDNA suggests that Amazon is more likely to score a sale by suggesting Donna than by pushing the Bears.
Serendipity in search is what continues to maintain the Internet as an exciting and vibrant place of discovery. Caring about who the user is will keep it that way.
