Does the Net Get Politics? Ask Jeeves
Journalists who write for the Internet frequently ask: Does politician X get
the Net?
They
find their answers by looking at candidate Web sites, testing their familiarity
with e-mail, and taking their temperature on Net issues, such as e-commerce
taxation or censorship.
At Net
Election, though, we have an additional question: Does the Net get
politics?
As Net
Election has documented, there are a large and growing number of Web sites
dedicated to American politics, some of which are lively and informative. But
let's say you come to the Internet without knowing precisely where you want to
go--the position, we assume, of the average person. How hard is it to find
solid political sites?
If you
want general news about the 2000 presidential race, the answer is: The Internet
excels. Go to the Yahoo home
page , for example, and one of the main 14 categories is "Government."
Click on the word "Elections" under that, and you're two clicks away from a
page that contains a slew of info, including breaking news, links to all the
major candidates' sites, C-SPAN's site, and coverage from Newsweek and
the Washington Post .
Curiously, not all the portals we examined make it this easy. At the
Disney-owned Go.com ,
for example, no words such as government, politics, or elections appear on the
front page. And even if you click on the ABCNews.com link, it still doesn't compare to Yahoo's
one-stop-shopping page. That's also true for Excite and Lycos.
But as
you delve more deeply into the issues, the major portals quickly get muddy. Say
you want information on Bill Bradley's proposed overhaul of the health-care
system. Will it harm minorities disproportionately because it eliminates
Medicaid, as Al Gore has charged? If you enter the words "Bill Bradley and
health care" into Yahoo, the engine will actually serve up some relevant sites,
including Bradley's official campaign site and a homemade Bradley on the issues
site . On Lycos, you get nothing so informative.
And
heaven forbid you make an error. If, like us, you initially forget to enter
Bradley's first name, the first site that comes up on Yahoo is for a company
that provides "training, consultation and treatment services for compulsive
gambling and related addictions" in Bradley Beach, N.J.
It's
the sort of non sequitur experience that's all too familiar to Web users. We're
supposed to think: "Well, these are just dumb machines, after all. They can't
really judge linguistic niceties like context." That's sort of true, but not
entirely. Most search engines don't actually search the Net every time a user
enters words. Rather, they sift through a collection of Web pages that have
been examined and approved for use by the individual company's database.
Getting a site approved by a big search engine can take up to six weeks. Not
surprisingly, the premium real estate on the page that shows you the search
results often goes to those who are willing to pay for it.
Another way of saying this is that much of the Web is not really wired to think
the way most political people think--which may be a good thing. There are
useful aggregations of political sites available at places like About.com , where you can get
guidance on every issue from animal rights to women's liberation. And there
have been some attempts to build "political portals," such as PoliticsOnline.com .
But while such sites do a good job of making recent articles and broad-based
resources available, they've yet to combine the Net's strongest
attributes--searchability and multiple information sources--with political
sophistication. Moreover, typical viewers aren't apt to stumble upon these
sites. Rather, they would need to know the specific Web addresses already.
So
while we await the arrival of a truly intelligent political Web agent, we are
stuck with Ask Jeeves ,
which Net insiders consider something of a joke. Ask Jeeves isn't perfect; in
fact, it often exhibits a grasp of reality that falls somewhere between a
database and the Magic 8-Ball.
And
yet, to our surprise, for certain kinds of political searches Ask Jeeves fared
rather well. For example, we asked Jeeves, "Where can I find information about
Bill Bradley and Medicaid?" The site immediately returned Bradley's official
site, a site for news about the 2000 presidential race, information about
Medicaid, and books about Bradley. Not bad at all.
Of
course, there are limits. We asked Jeeves: "Why did Al Gore pay Naomi Wolf so
much money for advice which, presumably, he could've gotten for free?" Two of
the suggested counterquestions were "How much does it cost to use America
Online as an Internet Service Provider?" and "What should I know about
restaurant wine pricing?"
To be fair to Jeeves,
though, we're not sure anyone has a good answer to that question.
