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Books & Articles I wrote.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

 

Three Search Questions

1. What is currently missing from search?

2. Who is closest to a solution?

3. What would you love to see (it may be years down the road).

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Vision is a strange old thing

I often wonder how people originally get the vision of something that turns out to work really well.

Take Google. For all the talk of algorthims, scientific research and complex IQ interview tests and more, the reason Google worked fundamentally boiled down to PageRank (origianlly BackRub) which in simplistic terms was the idea that you could get the idea of the importance of a web page by those who referenced it in a backwardly recursive manner.

In other words, you think say blog is great. This ranks better than me just saying it's great. Someone else also thinks my blog is great (maybe i'm now reached my readership base). That improves my pagerank. If people who think it is great are also globally regarded as great, then their weighting is higher. Simple isn't it.

After quite a lot of effort I may be starting to get an idea of how you get to the one sentence that makes a great product. Well, it's both hard work and luck. I may now have some idea on what i can do different to everyone else and the hard part is that for all the months of work i put in, the core part is pretty simple. It's like i can filter 30% of all the work i have done and from that create something pretty powerful. It's both frustrating and enlightening.

Now, i'm not saying i will create one of the next big things. But recent events at some of the major search companies tell me i'm on the right track. The next 6 to 8 weeks is pretty important. I want to get something out and find out whether i have nailed it, or whether it is just another learning step on the road to something that will work. I'm confident i will get to something that will be pretty huge - i'm just now sure what that will be!

But then that's the lucky part.

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