8.31.2006
Search and Memory: A Natural Combination
>
There is a lot of talk about the long tail, and go into any bookstore such as Barnes and Noble and you will see the book displayed amongst the best sellers.
With comments on the jacket from both Terry Semel and Eric Schmidt, it's a surefire hit.
Search and the long tail are a natural combination, whether the medium is print, audio, video, or something undefined.
Imagine human memory. Human memory (and advanced communication) is composed of a series of images or an image stream because ideograms can be regarded as a higher form of communication than domain-specific writing because you could say, it is platform independent. Imagine the pictogram on the Pioneer spacecraft, which years ago passed the orbit of the former planet, Pluto, which recently got sent down to AAA ball for some seasoning.
If I combine search, memory, audio, and time, we have a long tail demonstration.
For example, just a few minutes ago somebody typed in 'naqsh-i-rustam' into a search engine. Well, what's that? To most people, it's a foreign term.
But to the person who typed in the term, it is a pictographic memory.
What was the search result?
One of the results was this. Therefore, an infinite collection of ideograms, representing an infinite number of human memories, becomes the searchable universe. The search result can itself carry the memory booster. The same phenomenon happened with '40's celebrities' also a recent search. That search returns this
