More on going beyond search
by Jevon MacDonald
One of the biggest changes I have seen in the discussion at FASTForward from last year to this year has been in the framing of the conversation that went on at the conference.
FAST and other search companies have some of the best assets available to them to create predictive software tools and platform that can create new experiences for the user.
The question that I am left banging around inside my head is If we didn’t have search, how else would we expect the world to wade through all the information on the web.
Social filters, predictive interfaces and context-sensitive information delivery become much more important, but the principals behind them remain very similar to search. I haven’t been able to figure out what FAST and other search companies are doing in this space, but it seems like a squandered asset if they aren’t doing anything about it.
How about you? What can you imagine as the most compelling way to take the huge data sets that a company like FAST would have, and what creative ways could they be exposed to the user?
Me? I would like to see a page that is auto-built using my emails (the tool would access my email) that compiles all relevant enterprise content based on the text of my emails and and it would create a page for each email thread with the proper links. I could then easily share that content (if it is allowed) with the people in the email thread.
