The problem of „Information Glut“
The internet is a place full of distraction. Companies vying for your attention make a run for the first spots in Googles’ search results. The heap of information at your fingertips that is the Internet, is growing by the second and, let us be honest, most of it is of low value to any casual user. Do you feel like filtering out uninteresting information in your future search results and omit useless adds? Unouit make it possible for you to acquire knowledge in a focused manner. But first let’s have a closer look at the prevailing problem.
Reasons for Information Overload
So called „Information Glut“ can even be harmful to you health according to this Stanford University article. The Interaction Design Foundation gives some ideas on reasons for information overload:
“However, the most common reasons behind modern information overload include:
- Huge volumes of new information being constantly created
- Pressure to create and compete in information provision – leading to a quantity over quality effect in many industries
- The simplicity of creating, duplicating and sharing of information online
- High volumes of conflicting, contradictory and plain old inaccurate information
- No simple methodologies for quickly processing, comparing and evaluating information sources
- A lack of clear structure in groups of information and poor clues as to the relationships between those groups”
What can we do to not be overwhelmed?
What can we do to not be overwhelmed by information? Some of the tips, given in the article mentioned above, are:
“This can be done by using any or all of the following tactics:
- Feel free to ignore information. That doesn’t mean ignore e-mail from your boss or your clients but do recognize you can’t consume every drop of information out there and don’t feel guilty for ignoring some (or a lot) of it.
- Filter information ruthlessly. Create filters on your e-mail box and ensure that only priority material catches your eye during the day. Use filters in your searches to reduce the amount of information you get on Google. Only deal with what is relevant and/or important.“
Example Web Search
Let us look at a common internet search you might perform to gain some background information about the fish „sea bass“. You do not want to cook it or to buy it.
When you enter this search term into a common search engine (like Google, Bing or even DuckDuckGo) you get some mixed results. Although you obtain results that are more to the point, when providing more precise keywords, you still get a lot of unneeded pointers that can take away your focus.
When executing the search on Google on February 20th, 2020, we got about 225 hits. When taking into account only the first 110 results (the first 11 pages of results), we got hits in the following categories:
| Category | Number of Hits |
|---|---|
| Sellers and Shops | 26 |
| Restaurants and Recipies | 19 |
| Governmental Agencies, Not-for-profit and Environmental Groups | 19 |
| Translations of the Term and Dictionary Entries | 16 |
| Magazine and News Articles | 6 |
| Scientific Papers | 5 |
| Encyclopedia Entries | 3 |
| Stock Photo Sites | 3 |
| Other (like „Holiday Homes“, „Gaming“, „Name of Vessel“, etc.) | 5 |
How Unouit Helps You to Focus
In contrast, of these 110 hits, Unouit only returns 68 (these are all links of the categories in bold typeface above plus one shop that has a nice fish encyclopedia build in).
When applying Unouit’s blacklisting feature on all recipe sites and online dictionaries and by excluding manually some links I am not interested in using the „Ignore“ feature, Unouit presents only 28 links. These links are quickly reviewed as I get a preview of each hit on the right side of my screen, that does not contain any distracting advertisements. That makes it possible for you to acquire knowledge in a focused manner.
As I work my way through the list I can further work towards a focused work experience, by eliminating hits, that I find not to be that interesting to me upon further examination (by reading some of the text) using the „Ignore“ feature.
Those ignored entries will bother me never again, as they will be automatically excluded from any future searches, making them even more precise.
A last optimization that helps focusing on new stuff is that we filter articles that you already remembered.