Everything Is a Search Problem

You don’t need to know or remember a thing if you can quickly look it up. This means you can get away with not being organized, forgetting things, or not writing them down when you have a change if you can retrace the same path you made what you are now trying to remember. The thing is that retracing this path usually includes some triggers, things you read or talked about that brought you to a certain state of mind. Thinking about this makes me wonder how could a social network like Twitter be so popular with such an awful search engine, if you ever tried to search for a tweet you know what I’m talking about, it’s frustrating.

The point I’m trying to make here is that in tools like Notion, Google Drive, or even your browser tabs if you’re trying to retrieve something you should be able to just search for it. Of course, this is if what you are trying to achieve is making them easier to get back to later, there’s also merit in writing or exploring for the mental exercise, it helps us think. If your tool doesn’t support you open a search bar with a keyboard shortcut, and show what you are looking for with a few keystrokes, you should change tools.

Now the problem is, how will the search engine know what I’m looking for? There are some promising advancements in this related to what looks like content-based auto-tagging on apps like Raindrop and Google Photos. But this is just part of the way there, as the auto-tagging is based on data about something and not really on the metadata around it. Google doesn’t know if a photo saved from WhatsApp came from which contact, it has no information on that, so you can’t query it. I can imagine two solutions to this kind of searchable future, completely giving away a lot more information about everything you do, or having an AI agent that can interpret what you want and look for it on the fly.

Making this topic a little more meta, you can use this to think about your life experiences, what are photos if not triggers that remembers us of a certain feeling we had? I hope in the future there’s a product where I could search for things about my past. Imagine if you could simply use a voice command to remember about a travel you did some years ago or that restaurant you know you loved but just can’t remember the name. It seems this would be the end of forgetting.