Augmenting our brain with the cloud?
organising an individual's information to improve the search function
Researchers estimate that up to 30-40% of searches online are people trying to re-find something they have seen before. The web today is not set up well to support re-finding.
There are a couple of good memory storing services out there like e.g. Evernote or Pinterest. All of which let you indicate/save interesting content or links you come across while surfing to ensure ease of retrieval at a later date.
This is great for information you know you want to revisit, but what about all the other stuff? Weird things that you don’t know you want to re-find later but a future version of yourself really feel a strong need to share with a friend a couple of days later.
It’s very hard to predict what will be important in the future and saving everything to Evernote is simply too tedious.
Browsers remembers pretty much everything we do online and we are all, more or less freaked out about it. If Google remembers everything, why aren’t we benefiting more from it?
Search engines are designed first and foremost to help us find new information but they offer a couple features that aid re-finding.
Perhaps the most helpful is the color change of previously clicked hyperlinks. The history function is arguably the most useless. Even though many people are aware of it, most people will rather use the normal search function instead of pouring over a chronological list of links.
The introduction of "search" in the history function is a step in the right direction but it’s hardly used.
In the non-digital world, we're used to seamlessly and effortlessly moving from searching for new things and recalling a memory but online we lack tools to support this.
