Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter

CHAPTER 2

How Search Will Act

When search has better optics about the world, it will have the key piece it needs to become more helpful in our everyday lives. As we saw in the previous chapter, search is gaining insights into information and processes that were previously locked inside proprietary systems—either our human brains (in the cases of relationships, attitudes, desires, and more) or within corporate and academic fiefdoms. These traces of humanity and society—often tiny in isolation but powerful when cohered—point to new capabilities for search that seem less like the model we’ve grown up with over the past seventeen years and more like the Star Trek computer dangled in front of us in the 1960s.

In this chapter, we will examine what ...