jr conlin's ink stained banana

The US military has devised a way to ensure its troops in battle need never go hungry – with dried food that can be rehydrated using dirty water or urine.

Granted, water conservation and weight are both issues, particularly with the current war going on, but … eewwww…

i'm of a mixed opinion when it comes to the importance of search. i've no doubt that it's useful (in the same way that a spell checker is useful) but i've always felt that search is more a tool to use rather than a stand-alone product.

i've had this topic in my backlog of articles to post for sometime now, but i finally replaced the old ranting with this when i read the The Future of Search over at Search Engine Watch. As the lead in states, many of the real ideas are not in the things those folks said, but in what they didn't say.

Fundamentally, the hardest part about search is trying to figure out what exactly a person is looking for. The reason that it's so damn hard is because there's a fair amount of additional context going through your head that you're simply never going to figure out how to tell the search engine. (It's like the cartoon that was big about a year ago and featured "Your Dad" not sure if he needs to put down a primer if he's going to repaint the garage so he was going to look up "Latex Bondage"…)

That's not to say that most search engines don't offer stuff that does help, when they can. In fact, one of the previous versions of my rant talked about finding the time in Papua New Guinea could be difficult, until i tried that. i also know that there's even more shortcuts available so even things like looking for hotels in Fenwick Island DE is pretty painless, even with the various SEO tricks folks are spamming the listings with.

But there are still things that are difficult to figure out. Like what's the exact length and width of Manhattan Island in miles. Even if i go to Google, i still have to really dig for an answer. Sure, i can tweak my question to make it less natural and get me closer to the answer, but in reality, that's not what most folks are going to do.

The funniest part was the fact that the article mentioned that most of the innovation came about regarding generating ad revenue. Lest we forget folks, these are businesses, and what a business terms as being good and evil is not necessarily what a person may believe to be good and evil.

i dunno. i suppose i should be happy that folks are focusing on search and making a really great tool the same way that everyone focused on mail and portals earlier on. It's all baby steps, addressing what the lowest common denominator suddenly discovers it needs to do. (First it was find a reason to get on line, then it was hold their hand to get started, now it's find stuff. Next i'll presume it's "do something with it" and we'll see a Renaissance of simple client scripting languages or common API coordinated simple agents that automate tasks.

And right about then folks will realize that in spite of all the promises, it's still a typewriter with a TV stuck on top of it, and there's a new season of Jerry Springer coming on the tube.