antipaucity

Carpool lanes do not alleviate traffic. They encourage folks to either a) ignore the ‘carpool-only’ signs, or b) get pissed-off at other drivers ignoring the signs.

I’ve been in California for a few days on a working vacation, and the carpool-only lanes are stupid. Because I’ve been driving by myself to work, I do not have 2 or more people in my car, and therefore am not supposed to be in said lanes, unless it’s *not* between certain hours, which are, of course, exactly when I’m on the road.

There is a similar phenomenon in Virginia where they have dedicated HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes open northbound for part of the day, southbound for another part, and closed the rest of the time. To use those, you must have at least 3 people in your vehicle (unless you’re in a motorcycle or vehicle that can only hold two people, in which case the 1 or 2 (respectively) is OK. So, for those of us who don’t typically travel with more than ourselves or maybe one other person, those spare lanes are useless.

That’s right: even when traffic gets slowed down, those lanes are [mostly] barely used. So, instead of actually alleviating traffic, they end up making the drivers stuck ‘where they belong’ pissed-off at those lucky jerks who can use those spare lanes.

If Virginia were smart, they’d open up those spare lanes to everybody, with the caveat being that there are fewer exits from those extra lanes, so if you are a ‘local’ driver, you should stay out, but if you’re a ‘through’ driver, go ahead and use them.

And out here between San Francisco and Sunnyvale on the 101: drop the signs. Having one lane utilized at <15% while the others are stopped or barely moving is stupid.

All that extra lane has done is make traffic worse.

Search is broken. Google, Yahoo, Ask, Alta-Vista, and on, and on the list goes.

Hundreds of companies, thousands of individuals. I know why search is broken, and I know what needs to be fixed. Now to figure out the how of fixing.

When you’re looking for information, you search on keywords. Google’s been nice enough to rank results by ‘popularity’ (yeah, it’s called PageRank, and it’s proprietary, but it’s a popularity/relevance ranking). The problem is that you have to know what keywords were used. Some places are nice enough to suggest spelling fixes (it’s not ‘brittany spears’, it’s ‘britney spears’).

But that’s not the issue. The issue is that you don’t know what word, term, or phrase to look for. You have the concept you need to find, like ‘module’. Except you don’t think of that word, you think of ‘chunk’. Bam! You’re out of luck: no author would use the word ‘chunk’ when they mean ‘module’, right?

To fix search, we need to search on not just the keyword, but the concept. In English, you’d use a thesaurus.

So, you’re thinking: “This is easy! I’ll just build a comparator that looks at the keyword and then goes through an index of a thesaurus and finds stuff. And we’ll all be rich!”

Hold it, buster. You missed something. This is a perfectly valid English sentence, and you can figure out what I’m saying, too: “Bring me the cooler cooler cooler from the cooler’s cooler.” Cooler is used five times, with the following meanings (at least): hip, less warm, box to keep things cool, jail cell, big refrigerator.

That’s the problem with trying to fix search. Words can mean far too many things in English. But here’s your big chance to figure out a solution: I’ve told you the problem, and I’ve given you the target.

Now go make it work.