17 Feb 10 Facebook login fail and semantics

Tags: facebook, google, login, semantic, web

If you have heard of Facebook Login fail on RWW, read this first. It’s actually hilarious! But after guffaws and chuckles, it made me think, semantically.

My thoughts were echoed on RWW follow up post to what happened. Just a brief background on what happened. People searched “facebook login”, came upon RWW’s article, mistook it for Facebook, signed in via Facebook Connect and ranted how its new “design sucks ass”. To all of us in the “know”, it is funny and facepalm worthy. How idiotic could these people be? Can’t they distinguish between these things?

Apparently not:

As the web is becoming global (1 Billion+), it is becoming the playground for people not literate at all with basic things like a URL. They see Facebook as a product/service, not as a website that is part of the WWW.

It begs the question if these people are actually idiotic at all? Yes, they might not know the inner workings of the web, do you know the inner workings of a TV (or something equally complex)? Bad example, but you catch my drift.

Shouldn’t this “portal” to the net, being Google’s search bar allow us to take us where we want to go on the “interwebs”? It makes perfect sense to want to type into Google, “login Facebook”, to take me to where I want to be, without having to click on a search result.

How Google would deduce this when people would just want to “search” the term I’ll leave to the semantic experts. I have some ideas though.

1) Once it becomes clear what the user’s purpose is for each intended search, Google could ask the “searcher”, considering they are logged on with a profile, if that is their intention each time? Click yes, and it does it all the time.

2) We could use the power of humans to vote on preferred actions for terms. People vote that if you type in “login facebook”, it takes you there, while others might vote that it should stay a search term. There are obvious flaws with this approach and possibility for exploitation.

3) Pay? Enough money will convince Google. Instead of using the normal “sponsored by google” ads at the top of some search results, it could be a different colour with a click-able link that immediately takes you to facebook. If you cookies are set, it’s logged in. I guess this approach is very much similar to ads, but there is the potential to add further action with these links.

4) Invent new search “terms” such as the already established “define: <word>”. If you type in “login: Facebook”, it should take you stored Facebook login data on Google’s profile and immediately log yourself in, or just immediately take you to Facebook if you are already logged in.

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These are just some ideas I had to write down. Kept thinking about it whole day. What do you think? The approaches above are flawed. Can you think of any way to approach this? Would Google even want people to NOT view their search results?