The Future As Seen By Me In 2010

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Well looky here, things one has scanned in eh. (ignore the photo, that's some guy that made some accounting software, not sure what became of him ;) MIKE RIVERSDALE is fuming. The expensive headphones he bought in Sydney three weeks ago have just died. His first reaction is not to randomly spill expletives into his coffee, but to use his iPhone to vent his frustration to his Twitter con- tacts, under the moniker Miramar Mike. "I will also put, 'What should I do?' It's a conversation. I'm reaching out to the people following me." The council predicts hand-held digital devices such as smartphones will rule the world in 2040. They already rule the life of Mr Riversdale, whose company WaveAdept helps businesses adapt - their computing sys- tems to allow staff to work from anywhere - and with anyone. In order of fre- equency, he uses his iPhone to tweet (1136 followers; 8363 tweets since joining), e-mail, make phone calls and use online services, such as checki
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Relevancy ... that's the key word for content

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Flickr: Jack and Mike at Burger King #2I only ever want to see stuff that's relevant to me at the time I ask for it and one of the main ways I find stuff is by searching and, like most, I use Google to search. It's pretty good to know that 70% of their efforts and resources go into making search results more relevant - the better they are the better they can generate revenue (think better targetting of ads and the like).

And this is an example of totally relevant results.

Situation: I wanted to find the Burger King website for a link in a previous post. I am writing this in New Zealand and that's about all they knew about me (I wasn't logged in so they didn't know who I was).

Search: Google (defaulted to the NZ site for me) using "Burger King"
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=burger+king&btnG=Search&hs=R3U&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial

Results: Totally relevant! First of all I get the three main Burger King sites, BK International, BK outside of the US and BK NZ. These are not only separated from the other results (ie, they know that these are the most relevant and related results) but they then show sub-links to nutritional information, restaurant locations and the menu.

Next the results know (how?) that in Australia, which is close to NZ, Burger King is also known as Hungry Jacks and has a sub-set of results linked to BK/JHungry Jacks.

Finally we head off into other Burger King content.

Now that's what I call relevant results for a search.
Tried it on the following and got a mixed bag of results:
In fact, I didn't find any other searches that were quite a good. And more complex, non-company searches might not be as cool but at least Google are taking small steps towards it.

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