Just a quick one on search

I was reading this article and I have to say my first reaction was why can't you just ask the user. Of course few paragraphs later, there was the line indicating they use trained individual who evaluate the results returned.

But how can you train someone to think like me and look for the things I am looking for? Of course I am not that special and probably fall right in the middle of the bell curve of regular person. But I'd still like to think I am not exactly learning what everyone else is, or even not learning it the same way everyone else is.

One easy way would be to check which position within the results I selected to look at and which ones I actually reported as being relevant to my search. This could be implemented already without much changes to the current Google results, then again maybe they are already doing that, well the first part anyway.
Is there a way for me to disqualify pages/sites from search results already?  From this question comes the obvious next point. It would be nice to be able to exclude the places I have already been to. Or maybe not put them on top of my search results. Been there, done that type of approach, probably don’t want to do it again for a while. It is a bit counter productive for me to have to scroll through all those places I have already been to. We could at least flag those pages as recently visited, that would help me with the issue of, I think I have already read this, why could I not remember this based on the obscure hyperlink I clicked on.

As soon as I started thinking about how to collect what I think relevant is, I quickly started wondering about what relevant really means. What is a relevant result? Is it something that gives me exactly the information I was looking for or is it something that also gives me the ability to find something I did not think about but opens my understanding of the searched topic? Every time my mind wonders in that direction, I think about ‘people who bought this book also bought…’. Which of course is not as relevant as people who loved this book also read those ones when looking for a similar topic.

The other thought that came to my mind was, when I am googling, I am trying to learn about something 80% of the time and then I am probably trying to entertain myself. Can the search engine differentiate between one mode and the other? Should I be fed similar results depending on that search mode? Personally I am more interested in hard core articles (with lots of texts) full of information when learning and I need lots of images and moving pictures when entertaining myself.  You can tell I just like text by looking at this blog, I might need to add more picture if I ever want someone else to look at it and get something out of it. I almost want different modes, the casual lots of pictures showing in the results mode and the hard core facts one. And I should be able to choose every time based on the type of search I am currently conducting.Then again, not everyone learns the same way, it is a bit of a conundrum. Some people like to learn by looking at pictures. Is there ever the hope a search engine could understand the difference?
Here comes the basic point again: it will never happen unless we collect information from the user and usage of the system. And of course, I would not agree to it unless I could review the information collected. I would even go as far as saying I would turn the collection off is there is no way for me to be able to control the information itself. Anyway, I have some crazy probably never going to happen kind of ideas about what searching should really be. It cannot remain a cookie cutter approach for much longer, it will need to include personalization and preferences. It is only a matter of time.

Thoughts on education

I have a young child, so education is now an important topic for me to think about. Education is one of the important topics in the book ‘The world is flat’. Great book by the way. In there the author makes comparison between the intensity of Asian students as opposed to a typical American student. It also talks about the decline in investments in science and technology and how this might affect the US market in terms of innovation and its capability to adapt to a world market.

In some ways I feel I have been there, maybe not as much as I think it goes in some Asian countries (India and China). I have been in a highly competitive system where you work and sleep school work and you are being evaluated on a daily basis against everyone else doing the same thing. I suppose I should first explain I was never a brilliant student, I was always average. Within the top branch maybe but never much more than that. I have come to realize since then that it has a lot to do with my character (no comment). I did a French engineering degree which is not understood really outside of France.My parents put me in a city’s school, as opposed to my home town one, when I was sixteen because I was showing aptitude for school work and it would increase my chances of getting a good job. Since then, working in school was my entire life, or felt like it. Going on vacation was a way to forget things I was going to have to learn again. I was quite lucky, this only lasted 6-7 years. A quite short time compared to students in India who start at 11 and never stop of course. I majored in Math and always fancied myself to become a teacher until I realized most people in my class were not listening and as I never wanted to force people to have to listen to me, I pretty much gave up. I got into computers instead.
So I learnt lots of math and really enjoyed that part. I did a Master in England and the math level there was so low, we were studying things I did when I was 16. All the French students from my school got A without going to the class. We just read the material to understand the slightly different notations.
Since then I worked as a developer, then a manager and never used any of it ever again. I feel all I learned was the ability to be focused, work long hours and analyze a problem logically. This in itself is not so bad, but not worth all those long hours learning things I don’t remember and will probably never use again.

So with that background, sorry for the long one, I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the system. I wished we had more practical studies, how to buy a car, how to buy a house, manage your budget… Of course this will not create tomorrow’s minds but it would have been really relevant and helpful. Also, we always worked on theory and never quite applied any of the things we did. Even with math, there are so many applications for almost everything, we could have had nice projects to put everything in context. I always hated statistical lessons until later on I found out they are everywhere. We could have had analyzed results from questionnaire and find the patterns but no. Always bland theory. For my master I did neural networks, it would have been great to study that instead. But the school system seems to want to force the theory on you never telling you how it is applied. No wonder nobody wants to study science anymore. We do so much chemistry and only play with tubes and flames once or twice, what is up with that?

On the other hand, what we really need is to open the mind and encourage a thirst for learning. I am not sure anyone knows what will be needed for the next generation. It would be easier to teach them the thirst to learn and let them decide what they need. I don’t believe we can do that by having young mind sit from 8:00am to 5:00pm all day from 10 years old until 25 and more. There is no time left for contemplation, reflection. Only when the mind relaxes and sleeps can it organize/analyze all the information forced down during the day. My friends have slightly older children and they have no time left to themselves. As soon as school is done, here comes the sport activities and they are always going left and right. Probably to compensate the kids having to sit down all day and making sure they get to move around as well. Kids are meant to play, this is how they learn. I am not sure doing it earlier and earlier is also the way to go. Kids who learn to read at 3 do not necessarily enjoy reading, and to a large extend read, as much as those who learnt at their own pace around 4 or 5.

Here is one on my favorite talk, related to education:

I was also rather inspired by:

Both of them seem to suggest to me that the way forward might not be for us to cram information, as fast and as quickly as we can, into our kids. We might just kill their ability to dream and think outside the box. We need to make sure we give them room, sooner rather than later, to search for themselves what the world is all about. I am not for total deregulation of course, there should be some curriculum we make sure every child has. But we also need to make sure there is enough time and opportunity left for the child to find its own interests and way to look at the world.

Are we too busy?

I am not the first one, and probably not the last, to comment on how busy our lives are. I don't see mine getting any quieter either. Some of the reasons I can identify are:

• The line between work and life is getting blurred more and more everyday. You are expected to travel over the week end and not think about it twice. When I was living in France, and that was a while back, it seemed easier then to separate them. There you don't have to feel guilty about 2 weeks vacation and I don't believe I have ever heard of a meeting taking place on a Saturday. Then again, it was a while back. Maybe if I was a better manager, there would not be any issues for me to go away for a long while. There are lots of methods out there to help you be more efficient, GTD being one of my favorite. Most of the ones I like mention that family time is important and if you do work extra hours, it seems you do not really do that much during that time. I even got emails on well-being to advice me on how to do well with the family; I believe they come from the health care provider to make sure we don't get sick so they can make their numbers.


• With the advance of new technologies, mainly the internet and all, we have so much information at our fingertips that we are becoming attached to it all. It is very hard now to unplug. I know quite a few people that have done to the darkside and have an iphone or a blackberry and cannot go anywhere without checking their toy at least every five minutes. There is just too much information for us to process. It is difficult, we have ways to filter the information coming to us but then we would also be restricting our knowledge of the world around us. I might know what I need to know today but who can say for sure what I need to know about tomorrow? There are only so many RSS feeds you can regularly check without it completely consuming your entire day. We are all empowered now, we can push information to more people than ever possible, but how do you choose what to read? What is a reliable source? How do you find it amongst all this huge mass of information?


• Seems to me in this age of outsourcing, where there are probably hundreds of people who can do your job for a lot less, where we can differentiate ourselves would be in innovation and original ideas. But you need empty space to get there, it is not possible to think while you are being busy. A wise person once told me it is not possible to rush innovation or creative thinking, you just need to let it happen. Where do we find the time to let it happen? Even my long commute is filled with podcasts and news so I can be aware of what is happening around me and learn about the things that might help me in my career. I am aware of them, but I rarely have the time to analyze them and try to create my own opinions. Then again, the more opinions I have, the less I might be inclined to access new ideas.


• I have to say the flow of information is making me worried about my son. I am sure I will be ok, after all I only have so many years before I can enjoy a retirement filled with physical activities and contemplation (all those things I do not have time for right now). But what about our children, the school programs are barely adequate for the world of today, they have no idea what to teach our kids for the world they will have to face. How do you teach innovation and creativity? Classes seem to be taking more and more of our kids time, they play even less than we used to. I fear for their sanity. What will years of study and no play, aggravated by constant competition and pressure for result about things he will probably never use, do to their mind? Will they be forced to conform to ideas that will no longer be relevant? I suppose education is a whole new subject I will probably feel like talking about later. As a last ironical thought, I cannot help smile at those TV programs that claim to empower you to go and play outside while hoping you will agree with them and keep watching because they promote appropriate behavior.

What kind of conclusions we can draw after all this? I am not sure I meant to have any, those are all ramblings after all. If nothing else, I think we need to schedule some time to slow down, some time to figure out who we are. Without knowing who you are, there is little that can be achieved. We need to connect with the world around us and with each other. We need to make sure we do not use technology in such a way that we isolate ourselves from the world while we fool ourselves into thinking we are connected. For instance, I know there might be lots of goods things about virtual worlds, but until they add your face in real time, I would rather bet on video conferencing.

My wish list for Google Search

My current belief is that for us to truly gather information, we need to understand the source of the information. The easiest thing we could do today is to record the author of articles, web pages, blog entries...
We have lots of ways of doing that, tracking the keywords, owner of the blog, signature at the end of the page. Yet what surprises me is that the information is not displayed in a search result page.

It would be nice if we could see the author, have a way to review other articles from that author ordered by relevance to your current search. If you could use something similar to the Social Graph API to access other resources by that author. Obviously you probably want to limit those to the ones the author is comfortable exposing as public web sites (if there is such a thing as a private one still). I suppose you would also want to have references to web site the author contributes to without necessarily owning the sites.

Of course we all know how evil Google is, it is tracking so much information about us without telling us about it. That data is used to know who you are, what you are interested in and use that information to narrow your search result items to what might be more relevant to you. I believe the problem lies in the fact that this information is hidden from you and that there is little you can do to influence how the data is being used. I know you can view the history and you can remove items but there is a difference between removing a history item and deciding not to use it for future searches. If users could truly own their data and influence its content, I believe the privacy issue would be less of a problem. Nobody wants a system that gathers data about you, to help you of course, but does not expose how that data is used and barely exposes what the data is. When you make a search, I want to have an explain option where I will be able to see how my previous searches/wanderings have influenced the results for this page. It would be especially important then to have the option of saying don't use that one, this is not me really. Then I might be ok to have the information used to also deliver some targeted material. I need to know what the benefits to me are before I feel comfortable it being used by someone else. This does not mean Google needs to expose the algorithm used to deliver the results, only how my information is influencing the results presented to me.

Let's say the user now has a way to set those preferences, we could take the approach a step further. I would want to use something similar to Stumble Upon where I can rate authors and articles in the context of my original search. This would allow dynamically adding more intelligence about the document itself but also customize my search results based on previously approved authors and articles. On the top of that you can then cross reference results and ranking from other users 'similar to you' or from other previous 'similar' searches and maybe give more relevant results. Probably something not too far of the Stumble Upon toolbar which can rate the results based on your preferences.

For the more advanced user, you can start adding a social aspect to this and add the ability to register some of your friends and when you look for something your friends already found, you could have some additional information equivalent to your friends' recommendations. But by then that is probably a little complicated and too cumbersome to really be useful. I might have people I trust in my circles, but I probably do not trust them in all aspects of my interests. If we have to think that much before deciding how to influence my searches, no-one will go through the effort.

So to summarize:

• Start displaying the authors of the information and give access to their work


• Show the user how the data gathered influences the search results


• Allow the user to enter preferences for sources of information


• Ignore everything else I added

Contacts, what about contacts?

I have so much to say about this, I will probably split it into multiple posts.

I have been looking for a while, there is nothing I can find out there (meaning free on the web) I can find that satisfies my requirements for contact management. I suppose the problem might be in the requirements themselves, but we have so many applications already available, project management, to do lists, blogs, calendars, web sites. It just seem like a big hole in the breath of applications currently available.

I tried Airset for a while, it was ok if a bit slow to my liking. But mainly it is just a list of contacts and addresses. What else to expect you might say, is that not what contact management is? Well, that is a necessary start for sure. Here are the weird ideas I came up with.

• Privacy is a big one, how can I share my contacts with family and friends and not with the rest of the world? At the moment, anything you put on-line can be used to know you better, sell you more targeted stuff and that leaves out the fact that you are putting other people's information on-line. Small little fact they might not be happy about if they understood all the implications.


• I would like to start being able to enter some facts about all my contacts. My memory is awful and I need all the help I can get. I suppose I could treat my contacts as sales opportunity and use salesforce.com but I am pretty sure this is not what I had in mind.


• I want to be able to rate my contacts, there are people I really like I would want to be able to make sure I don't forget to stay in touch. I want something to tell me: 'Hey you really like that guy! You have not talked to him for a while, invite him over for a beer or go and have lunch with him'.


• If I am going to rate my contacts, I probably want the ability to share some information but not all. It needs to be tailored to whom, what type of people they are, family, close friends, etc. Also probably depends on the type of comments. I don't really want to tell some of my friends that other guy does not really like them.


• Of course you want to start linking your friends together, potentially this is a way of sharing information. you could say A is a close friend of mine and a good friend of B. So anything I say about A should probably be shared with B. I would also want to rate the relationship of course. A is a very good friend of mine, so it B but they don't really like each other. So I shouldn't probably share my observations. I can see how it could lead to a dashboard of gossips your friends could participate in to help you know your people better. Oh my god, did I just talked myself into micro-blogging?


• Now, I really want to add the social graph aspect to it. I want my contact management system to understand flickr Facebook, My Space and blogger and potentially alert me when there are changes. Not sure how much though, I still need to be sold on micro-blogging. I want to be able to search about my friends and learn anything I can about them from the web as well. The Google graph API might be a good place to start there.


• Of course this is really personal information, I want access to this information everywhere, on-line (maybe, but only with long term guarantees the data is mine), in outlook, gmail, ipod, mobile phone and regular home phone (yes I have one of those).


• Once you have that, of course this is only the beginning. This would be the base for everything else I do. Birthdays and contact points can go to my calendars. Schedules with people I work with and projects we need to work on together. I can assign competencies to people and when I have an question, I can go and see their blogs. I want to be able to define trusted source of information (whether a real contact of mine or not) for specific topics. Don't ask me anything about gardening and especially don't trust anything I might volunteer in that area.


• I especially like the application for search, wouldn't it be nice if my search results were sorted based on the articles published by people you trust in those areas. Not sure that is ever going to happen. Would I ever be confortable entrusting Google with that much information about myself and my contacts.

I suppose this is why I am still waiting for the right tool, nothing I have looked at comes close to this at this point. If there is one, please make sure to point it out.
Anyway, that is it for now.

And so it starts

I suppose any self-respecting blog should stay the reason for its existence. Wouldn't it be easy for us if it was that simple to find out about our own lives.
Anyway, I feel we are in the middle of big technological changes that will impact our lives in the not so far future. It already has of course, I am writing a blog that will probably never be read but then I can. I am now putting my thoughts out there in the ether hoping it will help me figure out some of those crazy ideas going through my head.

I suppose the major point of this specific technology is that you never know if it might benefit someone and you may as well post it for all to see in case it does.
I cannot stop being amazed how easy it is to be heard those days. No need to think about writing a book, convince someone it is worth reading and that they might make money in the process. I can just in 10 minutes or less start a page that will be made available to so many people. Of course they would have to be able to find it, find your content interesting enough in less than 1 minute (and that might be optimistic) for them to come back and read more.

Fat chance comes to mind. It is said any self respecting geek should have a blog to advertise himself/herself and share his/her views to the world.
Ouch, as a reader I am not sure I would qualify myself for either. That is also discounting the fact that it is dangerous to post and be liked. You only need to read about what happened to Kathy Sierra and suddenly it does not seem like a good idea anymore. Here was someone who had something to say, I really miss her blog. She forced me to take a step back and look at what I was doing and realize software is not built for your own pleasure (although I still think it should be an essential component).

Anyway, I have a few things to talk about, some experiences to share. Hopefully someone might even find it interesting and we will see where it goes.

Thanks for reading all the way to the last line :).