Web Surfing Work

LET’S SAY YOU JUST DISCOVERED ESPRESSO. For years and years, you were afraid to try it,
sticking with herbal tea and the like, but one day, wrestling with boredom and hunger at
O’Hare, you broke down and ordered a decaf latte at Starbucks. And fell in love.

Now, you love espresso. You need it. All the time. But you really don’t want to spend your
entire income at Starbucks, and you believe, deep down, that maybe it’s possible to make
even better espresso at home.

So, you do the obvious thing. You go to Google. And you type in “buy espresso machine.” (*) [Throughout this ebook, whenever there’s a screen shot, click on the asterisk and you’ll get taken to the relevant page. I promise that you don’t have to see the screens to make the book understandable, but hey, they’re there if you need them.]

Of course, you’re not ready to buy an espresso machine right this second. Even if the perfect machine at the perfect price from the right vendor appeared in a Google ad at the top of your screen, there’s no way on earth you’d buy that machine right now. Right now, you’re just looking. You just want to learn about what’s going on.

So, you do your search and find way more than 820,000 matches (*). The first few are triumphs of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). These sites sell espresso machines and have done a great job of getting listed high up in the Google results. But that, of course, is not what you want. You don’t want to only see the listings of machines, not yet. You want to understand what’s important, what matters, what’s worth it. Seeing the machines now is like shopping for a car before you know how to drive. Without meaning, it’s a waste of time.

A few sites down the list, I found that Engadget.com, a site I know and trust, has an article. So you click on it. It’s a pretty worthless article. But you notice that there are literally hundreds of comments (*). You click and read a few.

The first few comments are worthless because they are unsubstantiated boasts from people you’ve never heard of. But about five comments down, you discover a long, thoughtful post by someone who knows all about espresso machines. Not everyone is seduced by rational textual argument, but you are, so you get excited. Finally! You’re starting to understand.

So you go to www.coffeegeek.com , which you find through another comment. Nirvana! This is the site that should have been #1. But alas, it’s disorganized and hard to follow. So you spend three hours (I’m not kidding, three hours) reading up on espresso. Now you’re informed, you know what’s out there and you’ve read a few reviews of different machines. Finally, you know enough to think about buying.

So you go back to your original Google search. And now you click on an ad. You look at that site for a while, hit Back, click on another ad. After you’ve clicked on six ads, you decide to go back to coffeegeek and buy a $1,400 espresso machine.

Did you know that those ads sell for about $5.50 (*) a click? You clicked on six of them. That’s $33 Google earned because of your incessant clicking. And you ended up buying somewhere else. Google deserves every penny, of course, because even though you didn’t buy anything, you were exactly the kind of prospect the advertisers were looking for. You just weren’t ready yet. This is the best advertising the Web has to offer.

Congratulations. Now you understand how surfing the Web really works. You used to think that a magic search engine would find your answer and you’d be done. Not so. You found clues, you invested time, and you turned it into meaning. Since 1994, Web 1.0 has been an ongoing effort to ive you more (and better) clues. Web 2.0 is about something else entirely.

Source : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/