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kinda crazy how bad search is in most software. search is arguably one of the most straightforward ways that computers can augment human intelligence — yet we expect nothing more than clunky, poorly ranked, literal search, and chase after the newest niche feature trend instead

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Molly Mielke

@mollyfmielke

Aug 17, 2021

you know that uneasy feeling you get when you're searching for something in a tool but you're unsure of the exact words? yeah, that shouldn’t be an issue. nor should you have to use numerous filters or learn a program's search operators just to find things

Molly Mielke

@mollyfmielke

Aug 17, 2021

what if search were taken seriously as a tool for thought and we genuinely trusted it to help us find everything that we needed? perhaps it would adapt itself to how you use it, proactively find relevant things for you, etc. tl;dr: our brains need more lil librarian friends

Molly Mielke

@mollyfmielke

Aug 17, 2021

i'm just a girl, standing in front of my file browser, asking it to have OCR built-in so that I can find a meme I saved

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 17, 2021

I spent some time in '19 prototyping a "personal panopticon"; the conceit was that it would record all text (and other structured data) you ever saw on your screen, plus enough metadata to reconstruct context. Then: search! Had to put it down but still think it'd be interesting…

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Replying to

and

Ah, neat! It probably does need to be OS X specific. In my prototype it was very important to be able to tap into low-level window server, IOHID hooks, accessibility bits to get the data. Even had a component monkey-patching AppKit at runtime via a kext…

5:20 PM · Aug 17, 2021TweetDeck

Replying to

and

On the off-chance you aren’t familiar, you all may appreciate apse.io and gometa.com as a couple other examples in this space.

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Aug 17, 2021

!! I hadn't seen either—thank you!