Greatness

Friday May 20, 2005 - 4:09PM EDT

I was just thinking that we can typically agree on mid-level achiement. We can agree most times on what is good. But high level achievment is always a judgement that varies from person to person. Greatness is interpreted differently by each person. The pinnacle of achievement never seems to be seen equally by everyone.

I'm really tired. I am glad it is the weekend. Although I have an assload of website work to catch up on. I have an idea for the software. It is regarding content analysis for lack of a better term. Maybe communication interpretation. What I am trying to refer to is the ability to narrow down the subject of what someone is trying to tell you through context clues. Sort of like a search engine but not taking the next step of actually presenting an answer right away. Simply taking the inital query trying to understand it and quering back to clarify the original query. We do it all the time in normal conversation. Most of the time it is transparent because unlike computer input human interaction has more simultaneous modes of input and the context of the situation is more readily apparent. Context is so freaking key to proper human communication. That is why search engines can be so bad. Because there is no way for them to deduce context except from the text you type in. When humans communicate context is not just held in the words they speak. It would be found in environment, past experience, personal relationship. Search engines try to mimic this but haven't done a really good job at it. I suppose search engines could gather certain environmental data, such as weather or currents events info and factor that into the result (they probably already do this). But I would like to see a search engine take one more step before presenting search results. The intermediate step of clarifing the original query. Like if you type "java" into google it comes up with stuff about the software not the country. You need to type be more specific with your query to get info on the country. But there is no reason the search engine couldn't first present selections so that it could further clariy your original question. I think people would appreciate that extra step. It would make a step towards more natural interaction with computers. I suppose serach engines do this to a certain extent with spelling errors but not really all that much to clarify context of searches. I don't even remeber why I started this rant. I really need to stop doing this. It is confusing.