It’s time for search to innovate

It hasn’t changed in 19 years and that’s unacceptable

Here’s a surprising thought: Every person in the world from the President of the United States to Stephen Hawking has used the same interface for searching the Internet for 19 years. Trillions of queries covering every topic imaginable reduced to a search box and a button. What’s strange about this is that nothing else in the world of technology ever remains the same for 19 years. Honestly, think about what your cell phone looked like in 1998. Did you even have one?

My beloved mobile, the Nokia 8810 circa 1998

We gain knowledge and access information in a lot of different ways from many different places. Sometimes what you’re looking for isn’t easily described using a few words. Sometimes you’re reading an article or watching a video and want to search based on what you’re reading or watching.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re watching this entertaining YouTube video, “Did the Nazis Build a Secret Antarctic Base?”. It’s great, you should take the 10 minutes and watch it. It’s chalk full of conspiracy theory madness.

So much good stuff in this video, it makes you want to read up more on Nazi madness. But where to start? This is where today’s search really fails us. Sure, YouTube does a great job of recommending other YouTube videos but they keep you in their walled garden. What about the all the great material you know is out there on the broader Internet? There’s no easy way to get at this stuff using conventional search. You’ll have to mine it by hand — typing keywords you glean from the video into your favorite search engine. Kind of takes the fun out of it.

Here’s a better way: Why not just give the video in its entirety to some artificial intelligence and let it recommend stuff from the broader web. It would be both simpler and make exploration more fun. That’s exactly what we did. Below, see the results from Intellogo’s search and discovery widget.

Here are a portion of the results returned from Intellogo’s search and discovery widget. If you peruse the full list you’ll see such gems as:

1. The 8 Worst Mistake Made by the Axis During World War II
2. Why the Nazis Believed They Could Win the Battle for Britain
3. How American Nazis Used Summer Camps to Indoctrinate Their Own Children
4. The Nazi hunters who wouldn’t give up
5. Did Nazi’s really try to make Zombies?
6. Hitler was on cocaine and his troops were on meth
7. 4 of the weirdest things the Nazis ever did
8. Hitler at home: How the Nazi PR machine remade the Fuhrer
9. When the Nazis Courted the KKK
10. There may be no ‘gold train’ buried in Poland

What’s great about this set of recommendations is how varied yet spot on they are. Many of these recommendations are as nutty as the original video but a couple honed in on serious aspects of the video. Take for example #4, “The Nazi hunters who wouldn’t give up”. While this isn’t a conspiracy theory it is definitely described in the video albeit from the point of view of the United States chasing down Nazis.

That’s the power of Intellogo’s A.I.: it has the ability to infer and recommend based on loose descriptions in a source. In the end, this search use case is more productive, enjoyable and has lots of applications outside of personal entertainment. It’s just one way Intellogo is helping to innovate search.

If you want to try out Intellogo’s search and discovery widget for yourself, head on over to the demos page at Intellogo. Just be prepared to waste an afternoon in the discovery rabbit hole.

Note: If there’s a lot of people using Intellogo’s search and discovery you may find longer wait times. Just give it a few minutes. Once you start seeing results pop up you’re being processed.