[Sigia-l] For sale: "Best Buys"

[Eric Scheid]

On 19/4/07 11:11 PM, "Jonathan Baker-Bates" <Jonathan.Baker-Bates at lbi.com>
wrote:

>> A few years ago there was here a raging thread on the notion
>> of "Best Bets/Best Buys" as being, uhm, best practice for
>> 'guiding' users into meaningful results. Everybody was doin'
>> it and how harmful could it possibly be?
>> 
>> I said then and I still think today "Best Bets" is normative
>> and, in many situations, plain evil.
>> 
>> A new study at Columbia sheds some light on how it influences choices:
>> 
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html>
>> 
>> I'm hoping that this is no longer so counterintuitive for
>> some people as it was then.
> 
> Well, in the spirit of keeping things sizzling around here: it's
> certainly more enlightening than all that circumlocutory gibberish in
> "The Tipping Point."

That's on my reading list, so no comment there (yet).

I will note though that Best Bets != Best Buys, and conflating the two is
indicative of a poor understanding of the differences between popularity and
appropriateness.

In fact, the notion of Best Bets is in some way opposite to the notion of
popularity driven navigation .. it's a way to surface content which is
likely more appropriate to certain search requests in absence of traffic to
said content. If people were finding that content due to some popularity
mechanism then there would be no need at all for a Best Bet intervention.

At best, the two concepts are orthogonal, in extremis in opposite.

By the way, I've had my suspicions of popularity driven navigation for quite
some time: <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/981227_comments.html>


e.