I’m forever saying, to anyone who hasn’t yet tuned my voice out, that search will soon be like browsing is today. No one browses the web anymore. We all, however, spend too much time searching today, oh the avenues we have available to us. I can search in more places today than I ever thought possible.

Here’s the issue, I don’t want to search. I’m as interested in searching on my computer as I am in searching for my keys every morning or that one sock. It’s a painful means to an end I want stopped. Give me that Alfred dude batman has who’ll hand me my sock and keys just as I’m about to say “where’s my soc…oh, thanks Alfred”.

Add to this that I don’t want to put things in folders, name them creatively, tag them etc, all aimed at surrounding the objects with every conceivable piece of meta data possible in an attempt to predict the exact context in the future in which I’ll try to recall them.

So, examples of a glimpse of a better world? I present Tineye. The most publicized usage for tineye is seeing how other people are using a particular photo. That’s incredibly useful to a niche I’m not in. The usage I’m interested in relate to a more human search.

Check out how Ali used tineye. Here’s what I want. I’m walking home tonight from work. I walk by the church you may have noticed if you’ve been to Guelph. I consider how cool that church would look in various lighting and realize that tons of photos have likely been taken of this place. I pull out my camera and snap a picture. That photo is my search query. Hopefully tineye will show me loads of photos people have taken of that church, maybe even connect me with wikipedia and other information about the church.

Realize what I did NOT do. I didn’t craft the perfect search query. I didn’t tag anything. I didn’t even have to get the name of the church.

Why am I thinking about all this? Well let’s say that at brainpark, we’re hoping to do what I’ve described above with images but with your work product. Allow you to stop searching and get back to getting work done.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.