Archives / March 2004

Following up on last week's column, Google = Good Experience, this week I add another creative use of Google: the googlephrase.

Several such Google-related activities are already in action:

- googlisms
- google bombing
- googlewhacking
- and most recently, Google Rankings.

...and I'm now going to add another Google-related activity to the list.

Introducing... googlephrasing.

It's easy. Search Google for a long, slightly obscure sentence fragment, enclosed in quotes, and then revel in the Web-zeitgeist.

A few examples:

1. Googlephrase "i've always wanted to go to"...

Boston (she has no idea why)
South East Asia
Italy (he has a huge Italian family)
San Francisco (to study ESL)
Jamaica (for a honeymoon)
Bahamas
The Great Barrier Reef (to go swimming there)

2. Googlephrasing "is the best movie i've ever seen in my life" brings back a range of movies - all recent, but at wildly different levels of quality: Lord of the Rings, 8 Mile, American Wedding, Moulin Rouge, Life is Beautiful, Varsity Blues, Gladiator, 1492, The Matrix, and Pearl Harbor.

On the other hand, Googlephrasing "is the worst movie i've ever seen in my life" has votes for "Girl, Interrupted", In the Cut, The Sixth Sense, Cat in the Hat, and (quite unfairly) Master and Commander.

3. Googlephrase "surprisingly, i actually liked"...

Mozart's Symphony No. 30
Bon Jovi playing Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."
the movie "Tomb Raider"
country singer Tweedy better than country singer Ferrar
the video game "The Hulk"

4. Googlephrase "there's absolutely no reason to believe"...

...a Washington Post article about Afghanistan
...that drag racers will police themselves
...that a woman in a bank robbery was anything but a victim
...that Macs won't become "better, faster, and cheaper."

I, for one, have never doubted drag racers' integrity.

Such is the Web: eclectic, strange, and very, very random. Thanks to Google for pointing it out to us!

---

Update April 14, 2004:

Two weeks ago I wrote about googlephrasing...

Here are entries from Good Experience readers. Thanks to all!

----------------------------

From Matt Dobschuetz:

Googlephrase "I have a confession to make, I"...

... I didn't start Atkins this week like I'd planned to. And I've
been craving chocolate again.

... I recently purchased a 1:24 Welly (shudder) diecast of a 2002
Camaro SS in black. My confession is, I love this car.

... I have a fetish for women with tattoos. I never really admitted
it before, but it's true.

... I own an SUV.

... I bought a pop song from iTunes... and I like it.

... I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times.

... I don't recycle.

... I am addicted to googlephrasing. (I added this one.)

----------------------------

From CJ Cramer:

Googlephrase "why don't you go"...

... ask Hosni Mubarak.
... home early?
... Get A Life
... put on a dress and bake me some cookies you sissy
... to church - what can we do differently to help you?
... back to KS, so we can move onto more productive subjects

----------------------------

From J N Richman:

Googlephrase "why don't they tell you"...

...up front?
...mammogram not good for everyone?
...why you have a moon on top of your mosque
...about the administrators who are driving around in Mercedes Benz
convertibles or Porches, while their staff are generally underpaid
...that this year's rating was, "what a disappointment"

Googlephrase "why don't they"...

...practice what we preach?
...want us to kneel at Mass?
...look for the mole? One top spook is calling his boss a liar and
no one seems to care.
...Learn English?

----------------------------

From Oliver Brewis:

Googlephrase "the meaning of life is"...

... to increase fitness
... a bet. Who can live the longest?
... life's Meaning
... that it stops

Oliver concludes, "I think this selection of quotes amply
illustrates the intellectual wonder that is the internet. Who needs
Nietzsche?"

----------------------------

One writer suggests expanding googlephrasing: "I hereby propose to pile two more Google-derived neologisms onto the word-hoard: googletheming and googlerheming. Undertaken in combination, these two activities offer a sort of discourse-structural parallaxóif you will, a view of the 'Web-Zeitgeist' through 3-D glasses."

My brain isn't big enough to understand that, but if you're interested, here it is.

----------------------------

From Mark Doro:

Googlephrasing "I never intended to"...

... quit
... give Brianna away
... to take a gap year
... kill anybody

----------------------------

From Shiloh Bucher:

Googlephrasing "I'm fascinated by" ...

... the documents swirling around Britney Spears.
... rap and hip-hop.
... the concept of a Web Fridge
... what you're saying. [snort]
... post-modernism in a horrified sort of way.
... languages, even though I only speak English. I'm single, but I'd rather not be.
... the latest marketing techniques, and I've always wanted to be in a position where I can develop my own.

Shiloh concludes, "There are so many more... check them out. It's hilarious how difficult it is to use the phrase without coming across as a pompous a--."

----------------------------

Jeremy Esland:

Googlephrase "The thing I hate most in the world is"...

...playing drinking games
...selfishness
...spiders
...getting made fun of
...being around liars
...when young kids write books
...regretting NOT doing something
...catagories [sic]. genres. anything like that
...being legitimately despised

Googlephrase "The thing I love most in the world is"...

...the view of the sea out of my bedroom window
...right next to me
...just sitting and listening to records
...sports
...is not you. it is sleeping
...Manchester City FC

Jeremy concludes, "It would be tempting to pass judgement on any of these individuals, or indeed on human society as a whole... but the thing I hate most in the world is people who judge others. ;-) "

----------------------------

From Jan Reisen:

Googlephrasing "i wish i could"...

... fly.
... forget.
... bring you to the Lord
... shimmy like my sister Kate
... swim with the sharks
... see Bakersfield
... horde weapons of mass destruction and get nothing more than wrist-slaps from the United Nations.
... give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates.
... be like my cells.
... spell George Schlossnagle without copy-and-paste.

----------------------------

Charles Warren writes:

  I tried 'hates George Bush' and came up with Howard Dean, Hootie
  and the Blowfish, Kim Il Jong II, Larry Flynt, Slim Shady,
  Hollywood, everyone in Canada, and God!

To keep things balanced, I googlephrased "loves George Bush" and got ...

... Clark
... Jesus
... Fox News
... Kentucky
... Rosie O'Donnell [quoted in November 2001]
... Giuliani
... A critical part of America

----------------------------

From Tara Calishain:

As sort of an addition to Googlephrasing, try Cliche-Go-Round. Enter a phrase and it'll search for all iterations of that phrase, minus one word at a time.

(Tara is author of the book "Google Hacks.")

----------------------------

Bob Ryskamp points out that "my favorite is 'Say what you like about', because it's almost always spoken right before saying something ludicrous."

Googlephrase "Say what you like about" ...

... Eminem
... the outcome of this election
... cheese eating
... extreme sports games
... security vendors
... Howard the Duck ("...the soundtrack wasn't half bad.")
... Prince Andrew
... Mel Gibson

----------------------------

And my own addition, one of my pet peeves - the misuse and overuse of the word "literally":

Googlephrasing "it is quite literally"...

... the poorest excuse for a video game
... mind-stretching [referring to infinity]
... overwhelming [referring to "my first day in Rome"]
... a fractional power of the ordinary Fourier Transform
... making sure to always "tell the system what it wants to hear"

To rant a bit: None of these entries are figures of speech or metaphors, so all of these entries are misuses of the word! What's more, the word "quite" should never appear with "literally," since there aren't degrees of being literal. Ahh well.

As I pointed out on March 8, my recent Good Experience column on the Page Paradigm generated a huge response around the Internet.

Now, to add another viewpoint, a recent study from Wichita State University which states...

Summary: Recent studies have shown that while the use of breadcrumb trails to navigate a website can be helpful, few users choose to utilize this method of navigation.

This behavior, by the way, is exactly what we see in our listening labs, where we observe customers using the Web in as natural an environment as possible. Breadcrumb links certainly don't *hurt* the user experience - they're small and non-distracting - but they also tend not to be the primary elements that customers use to fulfill their goals.

Conversely, merely organizing a site into taxonomies and sub-sections, and displaying breadcrumb links to show the hierarchy of the site, does *not* by itself create a good user experience. There's much more strategic thinking about the business, and the user's relationship to it, that is required. Thus we distinguish the practice of "customer experience" from "usability," "information architecture," and CRM.

Here are the original columns...

The Page Paradigm (February 19, 2004)

Debating the Page Paradigm (March 8, 2004)

Consider this:

1. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are new inductees into Forbes' list of the richest people alive. (See http://tinyurl.com/2xjuf)

2. Google takes in an estimated $1B annually, and growing.

3. Google's IPO, likely later this year, promises to be the biggest public offering in several years.

These are impressive results. Revenue, profit margins, IPO multiples, and the founders' personal net worth: any MBA will tell you that these are good measures of a business's success. By any traditional business metric, Google has succeeded wildly.

Yet the reason for Google's success is anything but traditional.

Google's approach to business is simple, a single rule that - if applied consistently across all channels, interfaces, and products - will yield tremendous results:

    Create a good customer experience.

I've written about Google before, but a recent spate of articles about the company inspired me to remind everyone again. I'm also inspired to write because I'm continually reminded that many businesses - even a few practitioners of what we call "user experience" - simply don't understand the simple reality that drives business results.

    Create a good customer experience.

Which is to say, many companies base their user experience on the wrong things: office politics, "me-too" reactions to competitors, the "rules" of information architecture tactics, inertia ("we've always done it this way"), the ego of the graphic designer (who just wants to work at a print magazine), serving advertiser interests at the expense of the user, and a dozen other excuses for why they just can't afford to pay attention to the customer.

I yield the floor to David Kirkpatrick, Fortune columnist, who quoted Tim Armstrong, VP of Ad Sales at Google, in a recent interview:

From the beginning we had the approach that the user's success
drives the success of the ads, and that could not have been a
more foreign concept to the advertising community.

(Fast Forward, 3/17/04)

Now let's hear from the New York Times:

With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the
most popular Internet search engine, 'has a near-religious quality
in the minds of many users'."

And finally, let's hear from the users. In almost every listening lab we run at Creative Good, in which users are open to go wherever they want online during their session, they go to Google. Two years ago, we didn't see this: the average user hadn't even heard of Google. Today, people rave about Google in our listening labs. I've seen a day of listening labs where, unprompted to go there, unprompted even to search at all, 7 of 8 users go to Google at some point during their 45-minute session.

The enthusiasm and loyalty of these users is Google's greatest asset, the reason for all those traditional measures I listed above. And how did Google do it?

    By focusing exclusively on creating a good customer experience.

It's true that Google still has challenges to overcome. Yes, Google will soon face competition from other clever search companies. And yes, Google might some day fall victim to Wall Street's constant demands for short-term revenue increases, bloating its site for the benefit of advertisers and partners.

But for today, let's see the success for what it is: Google = good experience.

My last column brought on the biggest response in recent memory.

It was a column on the Page Paradigm - a description of how users move through websites. I said that for years I have observed users paying all their attention to completing their goal and no attention (outside of that) to navigation elements, which information architects fret over endlessly, or promotional items, which some marketers love to a fault.

(Read the Page Paradigm column.)

Happily, most responses were positive. These came from the growing community of user advocates, doing good work online, based on observations of users in a natural, non-directed lab setting.

The few negative responses came from information architects who were concerned that the Page Paradigm might encourage people to stop using so-called "breadcrumb links" - or worse, devalue information architects who get paid to create those links.

My response is simple: if you're creating a website or any other kind of customer experience in business, there's only one thing that matters:

    Did the customer have a good experience?

Anything that helps create a good experience is worthwhile. Anything else must be discarded. Job titles, methodologies, and breadcrumb links are good only to the degree that they help create a good experience for the customer.

The Page Paradigm doesn't say whether breadcrumb links are good or bad, or how useful IAs are. It's simply an encouragement to focus your site on the users' goals, using everything only to serve that experience, instead of building down from pre-conceived notions or rules.

[Personal note: Some people are (apparently) obsessed with little breadcrumb links: I'll admit that I'm a little obsessed with good experience. Thus it's the name of this newsletter, it's the name of the conference (Good Experience Live), and it's the name of the consulting firm ("Creative Good" refers to creating good experiences).

Good experience. I haven't yet found an idea that more effectively explains technology, transforms business, and frames discussions of art, culture, travel, architecture, and much else in life.]

And with that, I present you with some of the responses from readers.

- - -

Michael Angeles writes:

What [Mark Hurst] says is that goals are important and consistency (in how you present navigation, etc.) is not important... In an industry that spends so much time deconstructing the widgets that make the output of our work, I find it refreshing to read this reminder to see the forest for the trees. I know, for myself, that I spend too much time in those very details.

- - -

One reader wrote in...

I very much enjoyed your "Page Paradigm" article. It makes a lot of sense but definitely flies in the face of the formal Information Architect theory. I actually forwarded the article to the members of a team I'm working with and got a pretty strong response from the IA on the project. In a nutshell, she disagreed...

- - -

Information architect Victor Lombardi writes:

Whaddya trying to do, Mark, get my salary cut in half?!

- - -

Kristin K. wrote in...

I'm reading this just after I finished a usability test.

The page paradigm is so true. In fact, I'm looking at elements I
added to "follow the rules" (consistency, IA, design, etc) and
they are screwing people up. Just some validation for you.

- - -

Gel speaker Christina Wodtke writes...

Navigation is important, but breadcrumbs in their traditional
format rarely are seen or used... C'mon now, breadcrumbs are one
of the oldest web conventions so if people aren't using them now,
what makes you think that that might change suddenly?

- - -

Manu Sharma writes:

Mark, usually mild mannered and polite, on occasions does ruffle
some feathers when speaking about other UX disciplines... last
year Mark wished that usability professionals disappeared.

(referring to this column...)

- - -

Peter Merholz writes:

For those of you managing sites of more than 50 pages, heed Mark's suggestions at your own risk. It's been a while since I've worked on a site that had less than 1000 pages, and such sites require clear, coherent, and consistent navigation systems. Largely because this notion of "the Goal" doesn't apply -- many users have many different goals, and those goals will shift over time.

(I invite Peter to count the pages of our clients' websites... AARP.org, AMD.com, WashingtonPost.com, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Travelocity, and the others listed on the Creative Good clients page..)

- - -

Carl Zetie from Forrester writes...

I agree that consistency is overstated. Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." I have always advocated that the consistency that really matters is consistency with the user's/visitor's expectations.

[And] I would nuance your Page Paradigm slightly. The other thing
that visitors do on a page is Give Up and Go Home...

- - -

...and several readers told me that the Page Paradigm column sparked internal e-mail discussions at their company.

. . .

Related columns:

The Page Paradigm (February 19, 2004)

Research Supporting the Page Paradigm (March 25, 2004)