More About Search
(October 05, 2007) The other
night, I watched a couple of kids sort through their
Pokemon Cards. They were hunting
through thousands of cards to find a specific X level card (a Torterra
Level X with very amazing powers). The way that they approached the
search was very interesting.(Pokemon
cards are like baseball cards. Pokemon is a Japanese phenomenon that
includes hundreds of uniquely identifiable characters. Most American
children are introduced to Pokemon through GameBoy. It started out as a
card game and then became a full media franchise with video, electronic
games, websites, music and newsletters.)
The stack of Pokemon cards is somewhere
between 10 and 12 inches tall.
If I had to find a specific card, I'd
probably begin by organizing all of the cards in some relative order.
They could be organized by number, by name, by color or by type. My
search strategy would almost always include organizing as a fundamental
part of the strategy.
In part, I'd be hoping to stumble on the
target of my search as a byproduct of organizing the cards. In fact, if
it were my set of cards, they'd probably already be organized. (But
that's just a piece of who I am and not a generic search strategy.)
The kids had a wildly different
approach. They threw all of the cards all around the room and then
scooted around to look at the surface of the search. This surface area
search strategy is not yet possible using internet tools. It was faster
than my standard approach because it didn't waste time on overhead but
went directly to visual search.
People are really good at seeing things.
Organizing is a second level skill that may or may not be useful in a
world where 50,000,000 (the number of resumes) or 1,000,000,000,000 (the
number of websites) is the universe in which search happens.
One thing is really, really clear. Our
current concepts of search, and the way that results are achieved, are
going to be undergoing significant transformations. The current
orientation towards google-like results is a transitional and primitive
phase. Let's learn about the other tools.
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