Forget Google Instant: In the Future, Search Engines Will Read Your Habits
When Google launched Google Instant in 2010, it claimed that providing results as users type and removing the need to hit the “enter” key saved users two to five seconds per search.
Wolfram Alpha CEO Stephen Wolfram’s vision of what the word “Instant” could mean for search is a bit more literal.
He envisions some type of search engine which could — through data maps of personal data history — provide reports automatically when they’re needed without an explicit query. He counts this sort of “preemptive delivery of information” among “a large number” of projects the data company has been working on.
Though there are no concrete plans to create such a product, here’s the type of thing Wolfram has in mind:
“You run into a person (e.g. at SXSW); your augmented reality system automatically recognizes their face, tells you your social network connections to them, plots the time series of when you’ve exchanged email with them, does topic modelling of recent material about them (or email you’ve exchanged with them) and compares it with things you’ve written recently and suggests interesting conversation topics.”
Earlier this month, Wolfram wrote a blog post about personal analytics that outlined some of the data he tracks in his own life. It includes the same sort of data that could be useful to this type of pre-emptive search.
He has, for instance, archived every email message that’s passed through his inbox since 1989. He also tracks his keystrokes, meetings, hours spent on the phone and daily steps taken. Most of the data is recorded automatically.
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Wolfram Alpha CEO Stephen Wolfram’s vision of what the word “Instant” could mean for search is a bit more literal.
He envisions some type of search engine which could — through data maps of personal data history — provide reports automatically when they’re needed without an explicit query. He counts this sort of “preemptive delivery of information” among “a large number” of projects the data company has been working on.
Though there are no concrete plans to create such a product, here’s the type of thing Wolfram has in mind:
“You run into a person (e.g. at SXSW); your augmented reality system automatically recognizes their face, tells you your social network connections to them, plots the time series of when you’ve exchanged email with them, does topic modelling of recent material about them (or email you’ve exchanged with them) and compares it with things you’ve written recently and suggests interesting conversation topics.”
Earlier this month, Wolfram wrote a blog post about personal analytics that outlined some of the data he tracks in his own life. It includes the same sort of data that could be useful to this type of pre-emptive search.
He has, for instance, archived every email message that’s passed through his inbox since 1989. He also tracks his keystrokes, meetings, hours spent on the phone and daily steps taken. Most of the data is recorded automatically.
View the Original article
