With the Google IPO looming, you would think that Silicon Valley and the rest of the world considers searching for things a fundamental mature technology, worth getting right. Indeed many of us spend much of our time online looking for things. Some recent experience has shown me that we're still far from the point where we can find anything we want at any time. In fact, if anything, recent technology is still trying to catch up to a little-known product that was actually a Hypercard stack starting in 1992.
My quest started innocently. The other day I was on my lunch hour at a new contract job, and I wanted to find the closest Wells Fargo ATM. I could have asked a stranger, but I thought I would try out that wonder of modern technology, the mobile phone coupled with the other wonder, the internet. Well WAP being what it is (crap!) I wasted 15 minutes of daytime airtime trying various ways of searching and finally gave up. The closest I could get was an address for a single Wells Fargo from Yahoo's directory - probably the main office - or Wells Fargo's web site which is worse than useless on a phone based browser. I am not a stupid person. I am an early adopter, a self-proclaimed geek with over a quarter-century of experience with computers - blah blah blah - yet I can't do something simple like find an ATM using my "mobile terminal".
After that demoralizing experience I asked a couple of cafe workers who had no idea, and then I gave in and went to the Bank of America and wasted $3 in extortion fees to get cash. I could have called 411 or looked online before going out, or even called the 800 number on the back of my bank card, but I felt like I should have other options. I know the technology is all there, it is just not being used. This is so broken. We have GPS integrated into our phones for E911 (that we are prevented from using), and we have had various web-based GIS for years, but something seemingly simple, like finding the nearest ATM is just not there.
The most insulting part of my experience is that Yahoo's "local info/yellow pages" section of My.Yahoo can't find anything for "Wells Fargo", and only comes up with unrelated info for "Wells", but somehow today I thought to search for "Fargo". Sure enough, I finally find some Wells Fargo offices with my phone browser. Gee that was intuitive - not!
For a control case for my experiment, I also tried my search again with a real web browser and a real internet connection. For some reason, while the WAP version of Yahoo just says "Not Found", the real Yahoo knows "Wells Fargo". What I did notice with interest in the process, is that Yahoo has added Smartview to their maps. Smartview adds checkboxes to show locations directly on the map for various businesses and services that you might want nearby: Food & Dining, Recreation & Entertainment, Community Services, Shopping & Services, Travel & Transportation, Financial & ATMs.
Smartview is fun to play with but I was quickly reminded of how far we have come and how far we have to go with these types of searches. Databases are notoriously full of incorrect information, and Smartview is no exception. I looked around my neighborhood, which I know very well. There are restaurants shown which are out of business, ones missing that have been around for years, incorrectly shown locations, etc. This is not a new problem, and it is not surprising. The ATM view doesn't even begin to cover all the major banks' office locations which include ATMs, let alone stand-alone major ATMs or third-party ATMs.
Yahoo is not a dumb company. I'm sure that they have armies of people involved in this project, but they are doing a really poor job of reproducing something that four people and some volunteers produced back in 1992 for restaurants in San Francisco - right about the time the web was being invented. The Digital Restaurant Guide (DRG) was a Hypercard stack that was distributed on four floppies. Later, it was ported to the web. The web archive has bits of it, but it doesn't do justice to the Hypercard version.
It covered as close as possible all 3000+ restaurants in San Francisco, not just the obvious popular ones. What they discovered back then, and I sure it is still true, is that there is no good centralized source of information about things like restaurants. It changes too fast. They started with existing guidebooks, the Yellow Pages (remember them?) and city business listings, and then they drove all over the city looking for more. The database included reviews, types of food, hours, etc. One seemly simple thing that I have yet to see reproduced elsewhere is a map view showing the restaurants that are open right now. Of course hours are much more variable at restaurants than phone numbers or addresses, but it was still an amazing tool. Part of what kept the DRG accurate was that its users would email them with corrections. I'm sure that Yahoo will do the same, but they need to work on this aspect.
On the regular web, Citysearch or the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate have become my default choices for Bay Area restaurant searching, but remarkably, neither is as complete as the DRG was, nor do they have as useful of a map view as the DRG. And worst of all, Citysearch is so bloated and awkward, that I'm sure that the DRG on my 25MHz 68020 Powerbook could do rings around Citysearch on my 800MHz G4 Powerbook on a T1 connection. The problem of course is figuring out how to make a service that is useful enough to attract enough eyeballs, and then figuring out how to monetize those eyeballs. Even the 800lb gorilla, Microsoft, tried and failed with Sidewalk (one of the few projects that Microsoft has ever been involved with that I really liked). The sad part is that in researching this post, I discovered that Mark Beaulieu, the man behind the DRG, turned that into the USRG (US Restaurant Guide) which claims to cover "every restaurant in the USA" but it feels like a ghost town. The good news is that he's been involved with mobile phone applications for a number of years. Maybe something good will come of all this.
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