Our Approach - The Red Pill Version
This story begins some years back, probably before the time when the internet was released for use by the general public (1995), when – aside from the fee you were charged to connect (if any) – the internet was free. If you had some skills you could navigate your way to the information you sought and read/experience it without charge. Free is a wonderful model...if it supports itself.
There was a brief period when content flowed into the internet from individuals and companies who wanted to establish a presence...and make their information available to everyone. The mass of information was growing at an astonishing rate. Shortly thereafter, companies sprang up to help users find what they were looking for…in the form of search engines and topic-focused web directories. Users saw this as a benefit...and to support themselves, these companies turned to a tried and true revenue model - advertising. Could you blame them? We lived through static ads, active ads, banner ads, pop-up ads and with each interation, they became more annoying. (You owe your browser's included pop-up blocker to this period.)
Then the "web portals" arrived. They wanted to be your gateway to everything internet (and in so doing become the best placement location for internet advertising). The main online services like AOL, CIS and MSN followed this model for a time. Their users paid for access to the service's proprietary content and were also given an access point for browsing on the internet. Any company that was not already an online service attempted to consolidate searching and indexing in one site, again to be a one-stop site for accessing information on the internet...and a focal point for online advertising.
Both of these options attempted to organize the information on the internet in a way which best served their customers. Some used staff to filter selected destinations...but no amount of staff it seemed could keep up with the ever-increasing amount of information. Others used directories of key words. Websites were asked to register their site with these directories by associating themselves with relevant key words. But it was not very long before the self-categorization model ran aground. There were only so many categories available. How would anyone find a particular site in 100 pages of the same category? And on a darker note, website designers (along with marketers, advertisers and even less savory types) realized that the more labels a website used (whether they were applicable or not), the more traffic might be generated. Companies whose sole business was to flood portals with inappropriate category postings arrived. And that was the end of the centralized portal model.
Besides, by this time there were other ways of accessing the internet other than the stodgy old portals. Independent Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were providing access to the internet for a reasonable monthly fee. The centralized advertising model was in trouble.
It was clear that no group of people could keep ahold of or index the ever-swelling volume of available information. An automated process free of user bias and corruption was needed. Enter "relevancy ranking" and sites like Google. No longer would your site be compared with similar sites based solely on a fixed phrase or expression. Results would be based on a comparison between your search terms and a site's content...along with what was imagined as a better measure of a site's worth: its popularity. The more websites which linked to Site A, the better Site A must be, right? This may have been true at the outset, but you can see that with some skill, pages filled with links to a specific site could game the system. We will not mention the gaming associated with over use of key words for the benefit of Google's web crawlers. Sorting valid link pages from gamed pages became Google's problem as they continued to adapt the concept of relevancy to suit the times.
Google had to pay salaries too. Ads were shown with search results. Premium placement of paid-for results based on key words arrived (the yellow boxes). It is to Google's credit that they created the standard by which other search methods/results are judged...and they have been rewarded handsomely for their work.
But selling advertising was not enough for those companies still in the game. They wanted to refine how they advertised to make it more effective. What made one ad more effective than another? Who were the people who were spending money online? Cue the voice from the shadows...
Meanwhile (and frankly, from the very beginning)...The unprecedented growth and limitless potential of the internet drew the attention of the marketers and pitchmen. There was gold to be mined…if they could just figure out how to adapt the technology to their ends. Matching eyeballs with advertisers was their mantra…and websites listened because advertising revenue could offset the costs of the website or even generate profits. To paraphrase the 2005 War of the Worlds narrator, “...we were being watched; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns, they observed and studied, the way a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures that swam and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the internet, confident of their freedom and anonymity”. But we were not anonymous for very long.
Do you want a cookie? Might as well ask if we all want fudge. Sure. First in line. Save me some, right? When they are used for security purposes, authentication cookies limit user’s access to information and are used to tell whether that user is logged in. But there were other types of cookies – tracking cookies – which allowed websites and data-gathering firms to remember you and to track your movements as you roamed about the web. There was a brief window of time when the independent-minded user could prevent cookies from taking up residence on their machines. But between some sites insisting you accept cookies for access...to browser updates which rolled the cookie problem into a single all-encompassing security slider...to alternate tracking methods like web bugs and local shared objects, the problem was left to the user to resolve. And let’s be honest, the vast majority did nothing.
Back in the world of e-Commerce, the marketers learned how to have items you were interested in stalk you as you moved about the internet. Like a bad jack-in-the-box, that same sport coat would reappear even through you were on a completely different site. Do you want to buy it now? Then two hours later - How about now? Users were rightfully annoyed.
As the piles of information about user’s browsing habits grew, new types of marketers (including the search engines themselves) stepped forward to make sense of the data for their employers/clients. It was not enough that marketers knew something about you and where you went on the internet, they wanted to know what motivated you to click the link - the particular wording, the presentation, etc. So they began to track users through the actual links themselves. And since the file contents of a link are, by design, obscure to the overwhelming majority of users, they found a perfect place to hide. (We will show you how this works on the next page).
Unsuspecting users would click a link they had saved…and wait…and perhaps wait some more…while sites which had nothing to do with your destination were contacted so your action could be recorded. Only after all was tallied were you permitted to continue on your way. Users thought, "The internet must be slow today." Really?
What sealed the deal for us was our experience when creating our database. Not five seconds after selecting a website and clicking on its link we were accosted by - for lack of a better term – a happy puppy. Woof, woof, a pop-up window opened to proclaim a helpful hello and to invite us to provide our email address towards some wonderful future benefit. Wait a minute. We just arrived. You don’t see the greeters at the local big box asking for phone numbers from every shopper that comes in the door. But that is where we are today.
Reference: War of the Worlds (2005) - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407304/ HTTP cookie - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_cookies Web bug - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug Local Shared Object - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_cookie
