Don’t know about you, but my ability to find interesting and relevant information is rapidly diminishing. It’s not because there are “500 channel and nothing on”…rather, it’s because there billions of channels and way too many of them are interesting. We now need agregators of agregators to find stuff that is a) relevant, b)interesting, c) factual (when needed) and d) moderately well written/packaged/presented. The chaotic anybody-can-put-stuff-on-the-net model is wonderfully populistic and feel-goodish, but for those of use yearning for content on-demand, it’s difficult to find that proverbial needle in the internet information haystack.
A few internet centuries ago, I worked on a project to embed metadata on live television broadcast streams. The dream was to capture content, create arbitrary units of video information and stick those units in a database, cross-referenced with keywords, timecodes, temporal data, geocoding — enough data that you could, if it had ever evolved that far, simply enter topics that interest you and it could spit out anything related and, depending on the context, geographically pertinent. Obviously, construction on major highway in Chicago has no relevance to you unless you live in Chicago, plan on driving to/through Chicago or have a brother-in-law in Chicago that you want to raz.
That’s the problem with search engines today. They are based on keywords and some very rudimentary engines that try to glean context. But context is a very personal thing…geography, for example, is a very important component of information about roadwork. Not so much for information or news about federal healthcare strategies. Until information engines can know more (and make use of) information about who is searching, why they’re searching, where they live and what they’re personal preferences/idiosyncracies are, they’re doomed to produce greather than 1 millions hits for the most simple of queries.
It is possible to make order out of chaos…after all, even chaos is capable of being organized.