Exploring the Vastness of a Website

It seems that most people today prefer to have their content curated and streamlined - with less need to "explore". With the Muxtape example - that's actually an interesting implementation of a random content selector. But how many other viable implementations could you think of? Perhaps I'm just not that creative, but I can't think of many.

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#5

Post by cookingoils » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

FillardMillmore wrote: post #4

It seems that most people today prefer to have their content curated and streamlined - with less need to "explore". With the Muxtape example - that's actually an interesting implementation of a random content selector. But how many other viable implementations could you think of? Perhaps I'm just not that creative, but I can't think of many.

It's true, I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend a random content selector for Airbnb as an example. That said it could actually be interesting to see a selection of random places to visit around the world. Reminds me a bit of closing your eyes, opening an Atlas to a random page, and putting a finger down on a place. I understand your point though that there are times when random doesn't cut it or becomes vague. I also wonder if there are other simple ways we could improve explore pages beyond the go-to recommendations engine or random selector.

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#6

Post by cookingoils » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

TrevorFSmith wrote: post #3

Indeed, the random article link on Wikipedia is a delight.

I would completely agree. It is one of my favorite features. I decided to leave Wikipedia out of this post, but I think they've done an amazing job creating tools to explore the vastness of the site.

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#7

Post by FillardMillmore » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 1:26 AM UTC

cookingoils wrote: post #5

FillardMillmore wrote: post #4

It seems that most people today prefer to have their content curated and streamlined - with less need to "explore". With the Muxtape example - that's actually an interesting implementation of a random content selector. But how many other viable implementations could you think of? Perhaps I'm just not that creative, but I can't think of many.

It's true, I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend a random content selector for Airbnb as an example. That said it could actually be interesting to see a selection of random places to visit around the world. Reminds me a bit of closing your eyes, opening an Atlas to a random page, and putting a finger down on a place. I understand your point though that there are times when random doesn't cut it or becomes vague.…

I guess that depends upon what our definition of "simple" is. If we have content that we are presenting to the user, in my eyes, it can be curated somehow (like a recommender system) or it could be uncurated (random selection would fall in this category).

For companies that are trying to sell a product or are trying to present users with content relevant to them, that would seem to call for some kind of content curation.

I think we would be surprised if we knew how many online retailers still do recommendations based solely on your buying history (and also, perhaps, the buying history of others who have bought items similar to you). I think to improve these recommendation engines, we should improve the underlying algorithms.

To improve said algorithms, I think graph databases like Neo4j have an important role to play as they are built for this sort of thing. To present better and more relevant content, we'd need two primary things - more information about the user in question (and I'm all for transparency in both collecting this data and informing the user how it will be utilized) and better algorithms to leverage that information. With the response times of a queried result set originating from multiple levels of depth-traversal in a graph database compared to the response time of a similar query in a traditional RDBMS, I'd say that graph databases are an important and vital component to making this kind of thing better for everyone.

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#8

Post by cookingoils » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 1:38 AM UTC

aehtyb wrote: post #2

nice post making a page that offers tools to find random content on specific sites seems like a fun idea, maybe as a starting point for an even larger project

Thanks! Yes it does. Let me know if you have any ideas : )

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#9

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 2:44 AM UTC

Another place where randomization is useful is webcomics. I’ve gone through most of xkcd by just hitting the “Random” button, even tough I would never have the patience to sit through the comics one by one and keep track of how far I’d gotten.

Re: Exploring the Vastness of a Website

#10

Post by nerdponx » Mon, Aug 19, 2019, 4:30 AM UTC

FillardMillmore wrote: post #4

It seems that most people today prefer to have their content curated and streamlined - with less need to "explore". With the Muxtape example - that's actually an interesting implementation of a random content selector. But how many other viable implementations could you think of? Perhaps I'm just not that creative, but I can't think of many.

prefer

Supply-driven demand.