Future-Proofing Real-Time Search of Meat Space (with SMS alerts!)

There’s a big hole in search; why hasn’t Google, Twitter, or Apple stepped-in with a natural-language, Siri-style app to reap the reward?

Here’s the hole: real-time search (via Twitter) is an efficient way to take the temperature of what’s happening now, anywhere there’s someone tweeting, but what would search look like if it were future-proof, enabling anyone to receive an answer or update to any specific question or topic well into the future?

What the heck does that mean? It means I want to receive updates about these things, via a timely, low-bandwidth SMS at any time in the future.

• Please txt me when a new film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson opens in Atlanta, with a link to showtimes & tickets for opening weekend.
• Please txt me when the 1st snowfall of the winter covers the ground in Topsham, Maine.
• Please txt me whenever Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” is being screened within 250 miles of my current location.
• Please txt me once when the Washington Redskins officially change their name.
• Please txt me every time a news organization publishes a gallery of new photographs from James Nachtwey that weren’t taken in a war zone.
• Please txt me once when Lance Armstrong declares bankruptcy, with a link to the article written by Juliet Macur in the New York Times.
• Please txt me every time David Duval makes the cut in a PGA Tour event.
• Please txt me once a year when Terrapin Brewery’s “Wake n’ Bake” is available as a draft growler at Hop City or Ale Yeah.
• Please txt me every time a new, non-faith-based day-care opens within 15-miles of my house.
• Please txt me once a week with a tally of how many official concussions showed-up on the NFL’s injury report. (There were nine in Week 10.)

These examples are all “triggers” essentially, which aligns them closely with IFTTT’s efforts, but they have a level of complexity that might be difficult for an algorithm to parse.

To varying degrees, the examples are “human” (natural-language) questions, rather than the machine-readable recipes IFTTT offers. I’ve been happily using their service, and probably wouldn’t have considered what’s missing in “future search” had it not been for their innovations. These future-searches are a sort of hybrid between Google Alerts and an IFTTT recipe.

Simply, they’re future-oriented, always-on, set-it-and-forget-it searching, with SMS-delivery. The triggers aren’t built around social-media tools, they’re built on real things that are happening out there in meat space, with real people at real locations doing real (analog) things like shelve-stocking, business-opening, snow-shoveling, or bankruptcy-filing.

In the early days of smartphones, there were services that allowed you to call-in and ask questions and get answers from real humans, but I think Google or Amazon bought these companies (what were they called again?) buried them, or ran them out of business.

Has anyone seen a solution that comes close to tackling the hole between the limitlessness of Twitter’s real-time search, with IFTTT / Google Alerts-style triggers, but for the future?

When can we ask a search engine a real, natural-language question about the future and be able to trust that they’ll get back to us with 100% certainty?

Nearly 20 years into the promise of the Internet, could this be one of the next great technical challenges to solve? (Or is it just me.)