How Do You Navigate Your World?
How do you know where to go for a hair appointment? How do you know where the train station is? How do you get there? The processes of asking and answering questions have been altered so radically in the past twenty-five years years it is almost impossible to grasp. Finding a train station used to be a process based upon asking people or following signs and has been so completely reformed by the arrival of the smartphone and other smart portables, that it is difficult to remember how it all came about.
So how do you know? Well nowadays you ask your watch or your phone and it tells you. You might ask a voice controlled device in your car and it will guide you through the traffic and get you there quicker than someone who knows the area well. It does, after all, know where all of the traffic is.
So what are these pathways that we follow as we navigate our world?
Well, they are links.
A satnav taking you from your office to you next appointment is a link. It is a link because you follow it from the place you are (are we on the same page yet?) to where you need to be. We are all navigating our way around our world, and not just the physical world, but our world of information.
When you are researching something, whether online, in a book or by asking a friend, you navigate around your resource in order to access the information you need. Then you process that information and index it in your memory, keeping the most vital points closest to the top. You have ranked what is most important and then you carry out your tasks in order of importance. At least, that’s what you’d like to believe.
We are constantly navigating our lives and we are all following links, making indexes and ranking resources as more important than the other all of the time. That is what people do.
So who is the best at organizing and processing information? Well it is not actually any of us, but a set of computers somewhere, under the guidance of a company called Alphabet.
So we come to a realization. If we want to improve our processes, we already have a pretty good model to be following, and we have trusted it with finding us the right information online for decades. We need to start taking a few leaves out of Google’s crawling, indexing, ranking and reporting book. That is how we can improve our processes and also how we can present the best information we can to the GoogleBot. And that is important.