Friday, January 03, 2014

How Google can fix the internet in one easy step

There's an article circulating called The Year We Broke the Internet.  The way we "broke the internet" is by being so quick to share things via social media that ultimately turn out to be hoaxes.

Google can fix this problem in one easy step: introduce a reverse sort by date feature.

Google already allows you to search results by date, so you see the newest first.  Therefore, its databanks must already have the pages organized by date.  By adding a reverse sort by date feature, to simply reverse the order in which the results display so the oldest is first, Google will allow anyone to determine the original internet source and origin of anything in a single click.

This would be especially helpful for reverse image search. I find that if I'm doing a reverse image search of an image that has been heavily reblogged on tumblr, the first several pages of results are just tumblrs that have recently reblogged it without context.  A reverse sort by date would let us see the source quickly and easily without having to dig through pages and pages of tumblr purgatory.

If a computer system can sort, it has the ability to sort bidirectionally just as easily as it can sort unidirectionally. You can see this in any kind of table with headers that you can click to sort.  All Google has to do is give us an interface item that can activate this functionality, and it would be taking a huge step towards fulfilling its mission of organizing the world's information and making it accessible and useful.

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