Searching Google, Where Internet Access is Scarce

Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor. itwbennett writes "Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."

Comments

Put a computer where the intercom is!

[lee1026]

If the connection between the intercom and the operator is good enough for voice, that is good enough of a bit rate for googling things. Then just putting a computer there will make things much more efficient. (you won't have to hire a operator, for one thing)

Re:Put a computer where the intercom is!

[siloko]

And it still won't solve the other requirement, which is making it useful to people who can't read

or the electricity or the cooling or the reliability or the wtf is this or the pr0n over narrowband frustrations which inevitably will follow. I see this innovation as a good idea and the final sentence is the clincher for me - it is interesting to see what they search for - how our species has diverged through the random inequalities of resource provision . . .

Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical...

[maxume]

Oddly, the people using the service may not think it is useless.

Now, if you think the well-heeled feel gooders made up those questions, that's a different thing.

I wonder how these operators are trained

[Phat_Tony]

Looking at the questions they're asking, there's obviously a problem here the people asking the questions have no idea what the internet is like, so they don't know what to ask or how to ask it. They don't have the concept of what kind of information you can get off the internet or how you go about finding and vetting it.

For example,

2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant

This is the sort of thing that, traditionally, first-world countries have bureaus of agriculture, county extension services, and agriculture departments at local learning institutions that help farmers with this tricky question. You need information on varieties suited to specific soil, climate and resistant to local pests and diseases and drought, and the question isn't going to gain useful results without more specificity- ie, "best" for what. The advice that comes up in Google offers information primarily aimed at amateur summer gardeners in northern climates trying to grow tasty summer vegetables, rather than equatorial hardy macro-nutrient providing staples. It takes some serious google-fu to arrive at results that are probably useful to this questioner, and you don't get them by entering his question verbatim. When I started Googling things like "bean equatorial resistant hybrid -cocoa -coffee" I started getting some interesting results, but it would still take a while to sort through that stuff and come up with real information on what beans are best-bets wherever he lives. I can't imagine him ending up with useful information off of this Google phone line though. It takes an experienced researcher to find this stuff on Google.

For this sort of thing, the best thing you could probably do with Google is figure out who he should actually be talking to. That is, I Googled "helping african farmers," which led me to Farm Africa. There's probably someone working for them who he could talk to who could really help him out.

This is just one example I went in depth on, but most of the questions are of this nature. For the questions that can be answered easily online, it seems like nine out of ten, the answer is on Wikipedia. I think these people are envisioning the internet as being much more organized, authoritative, and encyclopedic than it is. They have very practical questions, as might be expected from rural, undeveloped areas, and Google is not well designed to provide them with answers to many of them. I wonder to what extent these operators might have already been trained, or might be additionally trained, to hook these people up with non-Google provided information. From what I'm seeing, a huge number of questions could be answered much more effectively if there were any way to provide these people with access to briefly speak to a doctor (or at least a nurse or someone who can answer basic health questions) or an agricultural specialist.

This won't work.

[w0mprat]

Seriously though, if some villager wanted the latest tweet from Stephen Fry read to them verbatim, then this would be great.

In the real world, a villager with no first hand knowledge of what the internet is and what it can do, will ask a question assuming it's going to be like some kind of oracle...
Villager: "So, how do I fix blight on my crops, and my cattle are sick too, what's wrong with them?"
[operator puts this into google now]
Operator: erm ... google has news articel blight is threatening tomato crops in rhode island .. i found a list of five top crops for a pacific northwest vegetable garden ... oh here we go: high-grain fee may produce illness prone cattle... yeah... um... you want me to read the abstract to you?"
Villager: *confused* "Um i'll just ask the witchdocter instead then..."
Operator: "yeah ... sorry"