Google announced a new Operating System (OS) named “Key Lime Pie” for their mobile ecosystem recently, and they only pick dessert names for their OS versions. No, this is not a post to review the OS, of it’s specs or their effects on our daily lives or societies, this is a review of the review mechanism that’s in place.
I was first exposed to the Key Lime Pie OS by a post in mobile web news site Verge. From that post on, the web will be filled with reviews, rumors (awfully called “mills”), announcements, events (& coverages), about Key Lime Pie the OS.
This is not useful.
Please see these screenshots of present search results for “Key Lime Pie” dated 05.03.2012, these results are all natural and are as you expect them to be, they are about what key lime pie actually is. In a matter of a year and a half we will be sacrificing these organic search results to Android OS coverage.
The driving force of this shift in search results is that the continuous amount of hyper-textual content being created and pointed to a different concept than it used to causing the search results to be skewed than the original source of the ‘term’
You can see another application to this theory at work for an upcoming product of Apple, Mountain Lion, (see most up-to-date Google search results). The product was previewed to selected tech journalists only 21 days ago (16.02.2012, see John Gruber’s introductory post.) In less than a month the current tech coverage of the concept lead Apple related content to the 1st page of the search results for “Mountain Lion”.
Yes, these new products and developments in the tech scene are enriching the etymology of the current definitions to the things we have and the concepts are stretched but also they are cluttering the path to the original content.
The only solution I can think of to this problem is ‘social search’ as it aims to deliver content that’s tailored to you in accordance to your social network, yet it still fails to deliver what actually key lime pie is for some.
