Sunday, June 3, 2007

Tweaking Is Innovating

Search Journalism: Tweaking Is Not Innovating: It sounds like the proverbial person pulling the blanket down to cover his feet, only to get a cold head - then pulling the blanket up over his head only to get cold feet.

Actually, it sounds more like biological evolution. Like our big heads with big brains make us better at solving problems, but make childbirth more dangerous. Or a mutation that confers resistance to malaria is implicated in sickle cell anemia. In a complex adversarial environment there are no magic bullets. Every potentially beneficial change has costs as well. I think Hansell did a pretty good job of capturing the "struggle for existence" of a search engine.

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