Barriers to finding my ideal bank account

I want to be able to search in Google for the most cost-effective account to use overseas. With certain assumptions about my usage pattern and a spreadsheet of the fee structure of all the appropriate products in Australia, this is easily calculable. The spreadsheet, however, is hard to come by.

Commenting on my last post, Jack objected that the problem is too hard, because everything is important, to various degrees. To take this in to account, a “hand-crafted approach” is needed. On the topic of everything being important: this is true. However, the vast majority of content on the Internet is simply not the kind of information that the semantic web is concerned with. You mighe change, slightly, the way you link to a product or item to make it more trackable. You might standardise the way you treat tags. You might more have greater standardisation in terms of flagging, for example, a review as a review, and a rating as a rating. However, the changes you would make are relatively small compared with the amount of content out there.  The time investment from individuals, minimal, the benefits large- once the tipping point has been reached.

Karan objected on the basis that the problem is too computationally difficult. However, as I suggest above, once the data is assembled, the problem is not at all difficult. The question then, is how to make that data available to Google. I borrow heavily from Berners-Lee in the following logic.

How to assemble data about transaction accounts in Australia? First, I suppose, we need to get a list of banks.  APRA has such a list. Now if APRA wanted to provide a bank search function, they could either try to lift the information off the website using textual cues or- far more easily- take advantage of behind-the-scenes tagging. This page describes such-and-such a product, which is of a particular kind (link to definition on APRA website), and each fee would be tagged as being a fee of a type (again, linking to an APRA definition.) The only difference from the current situation is the links. The content is all in place.

Once this happens, the APRA search can easily find the bank account I want. But how to get these results directly in Google? If all the tagging and linking is done in a standards compliant way- say, as described by W3C- Google can pick up on those hints and make use of the data too. Better yet, Google can easily use it’s page rank mechanism to identify that the APRA search function is a good match for my query. If the APRA search function is itself appropriately designed and tagged, Google can pass my query directly to it, and return the results without any further action on my part.

Identifying the search is easy, but Google automatically using it is somewhat complicated. This is by no means insurmountable, however. We’re talking about Google, after all. All of this is easily within the capabilities of technology we have right now. All that’s missing is the co-operation.

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