Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Contextual search...

This blog is called "radialmind" for a reason. It is based on my perception that the mind is radial and not linear. The whole concept is rather easy to explain. It is easier to consume a book by going through the hierarchy of it, that is, the TOC, the individual chapters, the paragraphs and the lines than it is to read the book from start to finish. This is the same concept that people from "mindmapper" use for example to document your ideas. It's not a linear documentation, it is radial.

You'll notice that when you start to read the book linearly from the start, each time you hit a header or paragraph header, you need to tell your mind to switch context. That is, put the particular following content into a particular context. If the hierarchy of the book is very poor, it will be very difficult to follow and read. This is because, I believe, you need to start back at the core of your context and take a different path to another part of the context where you will fill in the information that you are going to read.

Searching the web has some similar problems. All major search engines produce linear search results. There have been some search engines that do this differently in a sort of "related-words" kind of way, but these have been very poor because it takes a long time to get to your actual context from the point where you are (or where the web page is, rather).

I think it makes sense for words to provide an initial search context and then connect to other contexts of through verbs.

This post ties back to my post about "semantic web search". Rather than focusing on "nouns", entities, we should focus on contextualizing information through verbs and interaction.

So... maybe... as a thought and discussion to develop... nouns provide an initial context to the search that may be dead wrong. But the verbs further contextualize your thoughts into the specific items that you are looking for?

Room for further thought in this particular domain...

No comments: