Human Search Engine

#substack

This is the preparation for Search Engine blogpost on Substack

it will be built on top of Search , Index and Zettelkasten ideas

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Outline

• What is search?
• Why we need search?
• Why bookmark, tags are not enough?
• How can we build our own search index
• How to incrementally tweak and improve your search index
• Practical index building

After using Google for many years we think search is a synonymous of Google.

Google is really good to help us find information, websites, places, content, news, products, flights and many more information.

What is search?

Search is how we find information.

We use google in a daily basis to find websites, places, products, flights.

To perform search we provide a text query usually a question, some keywords, and hope we find the information we needed.

Mac Spotlight let us find “anything” in our desktop. It can find documents, applications and more.

Some apps has a spotlight search approach, in notion you can find pages and more.

Webstorm let you search for filenames, variables, functions, classes, components and more.

Why we need search?

Our minds are powerful but limited, we can’t retrieve most of information from our minds.

How can we build our own search index?

Have you ever forget about something: a book, a movie, a link, a github repo?

This happen for a number of reasons

We haven’t written down about the book

We haven’t add some metadata or text to help us find this books later one

We haven’t linked this book to other books we had read

Why bookmarks does not work?

If you keep a list of bookmarks in your browser you can’t add metadata to them

You can’t easily search them, you need to open them to figure it out what it was about

You can’t link one link to another.

Why folders does not work?

Categories and subcategories will overlap somewhere, and you’re gonna have the paradox of where to put the things you wanna remember.

How to incrementally build and improve index?

Every time you hit a miss (try to find something but it won’t get it easy).

Add a new note (zettel) to your note taking (zetteltask). I’m using notion for my note taking.

Add the link/idea/book/website/movie/podcast in the note

Add text that would make you find it later in an easy way. What were the keywords that you used to find it this time?

Add labels/tags to add them to some categories

Link this note to other related notes, so you can find it following a web of connections.

Let’s see how I index some common things

Book

When reading a book, I create a new entry for it.

A write down with my own words core ideas of the book.

I create 1 new entry for each core idea, so I can link them to other books and sources.

I quote some passages of it (very few ones)

A link the book to other related books and sources.

Person

I write down a short description to identify the person

I can have a small picture to make remembering easier

I write down some ideas that person has

The job of this person

contact information

link this person to books, and other people

Make your search Future Proof always testing them

• https://www.swyx.io/writing/keyboard-first

Find everything just typing.

We can use Human Computation to improve our search engine

You need to provide the right cues to remember

An index is A systematically way to provide cues

You usually search by prefix postfix

You usualy search by keywords

You usualy search by related notes/ideas

You usually search by synonymous

how do index videos/podcasts?

When watching a video/podcast I write down some draft/raw notes based on concepts of it.

Then when the video/podcast is over, I reread then and compile them with only the essential parts.

Feedback

A única parte que precisei reler mais foi “A note will be the building block for our index.” porque não foi tão claro o conceito de building blocks pra mim. Não ficaria melhor colocar “A note will be the documento for our index”? Porque na figura acima você usou “Documents” na segunda coluna