The last post dealt with the last step in a process–how do you get to the address you’re looking for after you get out of the subway? Though there are Web sites that are dealing with this problem, something similar is a problem on the Web itself. How do you get from general information on your topic to the thing you really want to find?

A couple of people used to call me “Altadurla” back in the late 90s, because I was good at doing Web research–basically, coming up with the right search terms to find what you wanted. That worked when the total number of pages on the Web could be measured in the hundreds of thousands, or even in the millions. Now, it’s a little harder. We have better tools but we have a lot more information that needs to be indexed.

So a big part of what we do when we’re designing Web sites has to do with making it easy for people to find what they want. The part that has to do with the site navigation is what we used to call “usability,” and the part that has to do with everything else is being called “findability,” at least by this one guy who wrote an interesting book on the subject, Peter Morville.

I don’t suffer from information overload in a personal way. I suffer from it in a general way, because I have to sift through so much to find what I need. The immediate remedies that I see are these:

1) Developers need to continue to use technologies that categorize their information properly, like XML. They should use CSS in a meaningful way, too, to help us to understand the information, and to get out of the way when search engines are indexing it.

2) People who make sites that aggregate information should encourage the use of things like tagging. I am sure there are even better ways to use the information that people provide, which is so often better than what machines (like search engine spiders) give you.

3) Google and its brethren should use incoming links and user-provided tagging as much as possible, and should work hard to remove automated, evil SEO operations. The better they get at identifying human-provided information, the worse the evil SEO types (and there are good ones) will do.