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Comment by anotheryou | Hacker News Reader

better search, always

Find me:

- an aggregation of everything I have to know to run a porcelain store in my country (taxes, suppliers, how to find staff or better yet: showing candidates directly, best location in my town, etc.)

- Fuzzy stuff like: the pic of that tree I took when I was on hollidays in XY a few years ago; or the note I took a few days ago about that band with some greek name

- a ready to paste, non-ancient js-script for XY

- a cafe where nobody cares about how long I sit with my laptop with a not too modern ambiente

- the lesser known types optical illusions

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Honestly, it may not be at the level you are describing here now, but I have been overwhelmed by the ability I've had to find small figments of memories with Google search. For example, I had a faint memory of a movie I watched as 4 year old, and could only remember a few generic nouns describing it, and after a few minutes of searching I was able to pinpoint. This wasn't possible years ago, either because the search engine itself wasn't ready, or that the information simply wasn't on the web. Now both of those are true, and only becoming more so, so they are improving in tandem.

I'm pretty confident I can find something on the web by only knowing a few keys words.

Indeed already amazing.

"Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. […] I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them"

from 1995 http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

today google shows it right away: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=date%20of%20the%... (powered by the now slightly more semantic wikipedia I think)

Would you need above info instantly or would you be fine waiting like 10mins for the results to arrive? Also, would you be willing to pay for it ?

It depends.

The 10 minute wait is only ok if the result is really really good. If I use google I do maybe 15 searches to crack a mildly hard nut, if each search would take more than 10 seconds I'd be too annoyed.

I would pay, but again it would depend on the quality and I would probably use it just once a week. If I could do it myself with google in 20min, I would not pay more than 2 bucks. If you can do the china-shop thing, I might pay 15 or even 40 if I knew it was good.

When I search for myself I get a feeling for whether there is more information out there or not. I'd have to trust the service to be good enough not to miss much.

I think you can already find that tree of yours today with Google Photos

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