Did a search for “behavioral economics phd” and looked at a site that put some for-profit Master’s at the top of the list. Going through its “Perfect School Match”, it does not have behavioral economics PhD listed. The closest is applied economics at all for-profits. Lame. Useless. Went back to the list and noticed the…
From Crazy: 90 Percent of People Don’t Know How to Use CTRL+F: This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use…
Facebook and Google+ both have ways of categorizing people for targeted sharing. The first way I attempted to handle my Facebook lists was basic categories like Coworkers, Family, Friends, Internet, and Locals. Then I switched jobs. It became a little weird to gripe about the new job to both, so I went down the crazy…
Companies are personalizing web sites for us. Facebook only shows us things like what we have before clicked. Google gives us search results tailored either to our user id or a number of factors. Basically, our perspective of what is on the Internet could be highly flawed due to actions we had no idea was…
Dear Google, When you treat special characters such as underscores, colons, and hyphens as a space, you corrupt my search for a single term into multiple terms, aka not what I sought, so I get too many useless results. Function names, class names, or file  names ought to be treated as a single word not…
A few basics of Search Engine Optimization came up at brunch a couple weekends ago. A few of the key points were that its not just important to have good information, but one has to have good metadata, good incoming links to raise authority, and no nefarious techniques. When I saw this, I immediate thought…