Google Find

How our knowledge of the brain could improve how we search and find online

Do you know that feeling of trying to find that awesome article you read a month ago and now feel a strong need to send a friend because something they said made you think of it?

There are a couple of good memory storing services out there like Evernote, Pinterest and Pinboard. All of which let you indicate/save interesting content or links you come across while surfing in order 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.

Google 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 benefitting more from it? Re-finding is defined as the activity to find previously viewed search results and has been estimated to constitute as much as 40% of all online searches.

Search engines are designed first and for-most 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. “I remember a rather nice article I happened upon a couple of weeks ago. Now, lets see. It must have been on Tuesday the 14th at 3.28PM.” Not many people’s minds operate in this way, mine certainly doesn’t. The introduction of search in the history function is a step in the right direction but it’s hardly used. It isn’t top of mind.

Introducing the Google Find button

Imaging instead if we could simply have a re-find button to complement the search button. Would this be possible? It would bring up all links you have previously clicked on (a.k.a. purple hyperlinks) as well as other pages and content you have stumbled across as you jumped from blog to news article to social network. If you were searching for an image, it would bring up all images that you have seen on the aforementioned sites, and only those images. Put those cookies to use!

Search results could be ordered based on recency so that the latest visited result ends up on top. The strength of the memory could also be indicated. The solution seems almost too simple. I’m not sure how feasible this is from a technical standpoint but who knows? I’d love some input on this.

We are already starting to treat the web as an extension of our memory. Taking inspiration from how the long-term memory (LTM) is organised and functions could change the way we think about searching the web.

Psychomimicry

I’m interested in merging my background in psychology and interaction design, which I try to do under the insignia of psychomimicry. It’s an entirely made up and unofficial branch of biomimicry. I define it as “the examination of the human mind, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from to improve our digital experience.” More about psychomimicry.