Google Search technology took the world by storm. The tempest was originally hidden within Yahoo! Search and later broke away to become its own company.
As it did this, Google assumed the throne as the best way to find information on the internet quickly and efficiently. That was years ago and many people have since learned better how to manipulate this super highway of information, and more importantly internet readers and coral the to a site to earn advertising money from them, often with Google’s help.
One of Google’s primary advantages was its advanced and continually advancing algorithms that enables the company to continually and endlessly index the internet and all of the billions of web pages that get added, removed and updated through out the months and years. This was a major advance over Yahoo!’s original preference for editorialized directories that served to categorize information and provide a contextual description.
Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikia the company that created Wikipedia is hoping to use a type of intelligence even greater than a Google created algorithm. Wales would like to use NAI or Non-Artificial Intelligence. If you are reading through the pun, you have deciphered it correctly, he wants to use people.
This almost seems like a throw back to editorialized categories, but instead of providing descriptions, this Wiki version of internet search would provide user generated context. Instead of a single editor or small group of editors that would be responsible as experts for a topic, the model would be more Wiki like, enabling people to contribute and refine the context from all around the world in many different languages.
Wikipedia provides an online user contributed and edited encyclopedia of everything that is entered, modified and updated in real time.
Creating search tools that are modified and refined by actual people as opposed to algorithms might just push ahead of Google Search. Google does incorporate surfing metrics from people as well as it attempts to gauge how successfully a person has been guided to a destination website. Wikipedia Search could take a different form where a user searching for information reads not a description but actual secondary or tertiary source background on the topic with hyperlinks off to the primary and secondary sources of that information, thus educating visitors and directing them to a site in context as they read.
Think of the tool like a three year old asking questions:
Why do fish swim?
They swim because they live in the water.
Why do they live in the water?
Because they cannot breathe air directly but use gills to extract air from the water.
What are gills?
At each branch the child or searcher or questioning group, can opt to pursue what might seem like a tangent, but in actuality they are refining their understanding so that they can gain better understanding and to possibly ask better questions.
A person sometimes has some information and might ask a question that takes them into the middle of a topic. If they do not find the context to show them that they are learning about the process half way through, they could miss a crucial step. Like a skydiver that misses the step 1. Pull rip chord and jumps directly to the instructions on navigating an inflated parachute and how to land.
A Wiki Search service might guide us searchers safely to Earth with a better comprehension of the topic that we are researching, and prevent the befuddlement that comes from a search result that tells us that the answer to everything in the Universe is 42.
) I found a large number of technologies converging around the concept of an improved user interface to the computer. This for me was the most important aspect of the show and seemed to signal the direction of technology going into the next 2-4 years.
