Comment by shorbaji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shorbaji | Hacker News Reader

I would focus on anticipating the user's search needs even before he/she formulates them and types out a search query.

I would use as much context that a user is willing to provide me - location, recent email messages, voice call transcripts, unread messages, web browsing history, etc - to try to anticipate what the user is likely to query for.

For example, a sales engineer who receives a technical query in his email inbox is likely to be searching for product information once behind his/her laptop. Also, a student that lands in NY JFK airport one a morning, will likely be searching for restaurants in the vicinity by evening.

I would focus on anticipating such queries (among a range of others) in advance. And would let the user choose which ones he/she wants answers for.

I'm sure this is easier said than done, but is a direction I think is worth exploring.

If you can anticipate a user's search needs, why not take the next step and provide the answers before the user gets around to searching?

One step at a time :)

What you suggest would benefit from the performance/feedback from what the OP suggests.

This is basically what I am interested on working on currently , using "clues" gleaned from what the user is doing (a la RescueTime) to reorganize/reformulate a user's search query.

Let's talk - my e-mail address is in my profile.

I would be happy to chat about this. Please drop me a note. My email is in my profile.

Your e-mail address doesn't seem to be visible in your profile.

You're right. Fixed.

First reason is to minimize error rather compound it. Second reason is to avoid overloading the user with information. I do expect that the set of queries prepared for a user will be large and possibly imperfectly ranked, at least initially. To use this set in its raw form to pre-fetch answers will dilute accuracy and be a large amount of information.

Rather, I take the approach that search is a commodity that is already fast enough and good enough. I let the user choose (and thereby rate/vote up) a query and then fetch only relevant results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com