The Community is Correct 91% of the Time

By Rob Howard (@robhoward) Dec 6, 2011

We are all overwhelmed with content on a daily basis. Our feeds blink in and out of our peripheral vision, our 7 communication streams ping and honk and shout for attention, our searches result in 600,000,000 results. How we prioritize this information stream and glean insight and relevance from the flood is an ongoing evolving process. The wisdom of the crowd is here to help.

“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” the popular television game show originally hosted by Regis Philbin, enables a contestant to compete for one million dollars by answering a series of questions. The format of the show is based more on suspense than speed. The trivia gets progressively more complex and the cash prize increases with each question. As the questions get tougher, contestants can use “lifelines” for help:

Phone-A-Friend: Submit the question to a friend with topical expertise. Typically, this person is a trivia expert or someone well versed in web search.
Ask the Audience: Pose the question to the audience. The in-studio audience is given the opportunity to assist the contestant by voting on the available choices.
Fifty-Fifty: Two of the four answers are removed, leaving only two possible answers from which the contestant can choose.

The Phone-A-Friend “expert” gets the answer correct 65% of the time. Asking the audience, or crowdsourcing the decision, results in a correct answer 91% of the time. This is documented in the book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” by James Surowiecki.

Social Rank, Not Just Page Rank

For the past 15 years, the web has been driven by content first and then by search. We spent the first five years creating lots of linked content (remember that novelty?) and the last 10 years watching search engine technologies begin to rise in popularity.

The most prominent has been Google and its use of page rank as a determining factor of the importance and relevance of content. And along the way, a cottage industry designed around optimizing content for search sprung up: search engine optimization.

Then, the mid-2000s ushered in a new trend: Web 2.0 and the interactive web. These social capabilities, where people interact and share ideas/feedback, have become the dominant way in which people make decisions.

Similar to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” people have found that the crowd (social communities), not necessarily the expert (search engines), is the preferable source for obtaining detailed, personalized answers to very specific questions. Taking the route of gaining information from others eliminates the expert and local search bias while also allowing for various voices to be heard.

Search isn’t going away anytime soon. The way we think about search and how we make decisions is going to continue to evolve. Rather than basing the importance of content solely on page rank or similar algorithms, I expect to see a “social rank” that scores content based on how people interact with, and the conversations that are formed around, that content. Companies such as Amazon.com have already implemented this for their product experience. The next evolution of search will apply social ranking to the entire experience of receiving and reviewing content online.

Looking into the future, social communities, whether for consumers or employees, will play a critical role in enabling the discovery of information and in the fight for content relevance.

Creating Content Relevance

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” While there is some debate as to what constitutes “information,” there is no question that the amount of content available today is unprecedented, with more being added every second.