Flaptor

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
(falsely attributed to) Charles H. Duell
Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899

When we think of searching for information, we imagine a text box on a white page with a button next to it. Type a few words, get a list of links and snippets of web pages in a fraction of a second. This interface has remained pretty much unchanged for the past decade. Google perfected it by eliminating unnecessary clutter and leaving just the essential inputs and outputs. Now, time for some rhetorical questions. Is this it? What will the experience of searching for information will look like ten, twenty, one hundred years from now? Is there room for a third question?

The best way to start speculating about what’s in store is to focus not on what we have, but on what’s missing. What can’t we find today on Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, (your search engine of choice)? I can think of a number of questions for which I can’t find easy answers today:

• Where in the world is my friend Bob right now?
• Can I find the episode of (obscure TV show of choice) where a given character appears dressed in drag (and watch it right now)?
  I remember the keyboard riff and some words from an 80s song, it sounded like New Order but it wasn’t. If Google could read my brain, or if someone had type the previous sentence on a page containing the song name, maybe I could find it. As things stand, I can’t.
• I saw this girl/boy/(not sure) at a club. I was instantly struck by his/her/its beautiful (insert your favorite physical feature) and I want to find this person.

Let’s look at the first one: how to find Bob. This one would require some combination of gps + cellphones + wifi. There are already some services such as Loopt, which lets you use your cellphone as a tracking device. The idea is that you can share your location with a closed groups of people. Your phone knows where you are and sends updates to a server (only when you make yourself available). In the future these types of services won’t even require gps as cellphone and wifi networks become more able to pinpoint the location of a device.

As for the TV episode, YouTube is starting to look like that. The main hurdle in this case is not technical but rather a legal one, which perhaps now Google will be able to address. Copyrighted digital content lives in a world filled with clashing business models and conflicts of interests. The application is so compelling that it is only a matter of time until starts align and every movie, tv show or amateur video ever published becomes available online. Free, subscription, pay-per-view, someone will figure it out eventually. This technology has the potential to be devastatingly addictive: your favorite tv show’s marathon is waiting at your fingertips. The question I haven’t addressed so far is how to find one given episode of a show without knowing even a line of dialog in it (more on that later, stay tuned!).

The question of finding a song or a face can be grouped together because they represent cases in which one big part of the problem is how to enter the information to search for. Can I grab a microphone and whistle a tune? Can I draw a sketch of someone’s face? How about a description of someone combined with historical location records for a service like the above?

The point I’m trying to make is that the two key aspects to search are: 1) gather the information and 2) build the technology to sift through it. Like I said above, there is still a plethora of information that is simply not available online. No matter how much you are willing to pay, it’s just not there yet. For example, I would like to sit down in front of the TV and search for a list of concerts happening in my area. Perhaps my favorite band is playing ten blocks from where I live, but I’d rather watch it from the comfort of my couch. Or they are playing in a different country. On any given night there are probably tens of thousands of bands playing around the world. A percentage of those shows are being filmed. Some of those are streamed on the internet. One of the things I would like to see is a service that allowed me to search for anything that can be watched on my TV. Not just what YouTube does but also live content.

As for the pending question on how to find something without text, that one is a broad research topic. One way to solve this is by using collective wisdom to tag content. This is what the ESP game is attempting to do. Of course, Artificial Intelligence is always coming soon and “in the next five/ten/twenty years” everything will change: computers will recognize faces, objects and situations: “Computer, find me all funny videos of car crashes. Not the ones you consider funny but the ones I do!”. I’m certainly not holding my breath. The one thing that does look like a pattern is that as more content becomes available online, people will come up with ways of organizing it and finding it. Of course, all of us here at Flaptor spend countless hours discussing these problems. One of these days we might even solve one or two.

Posted in Editorial — December 18th, 2006