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.