Find More

Here we push on an idea that has emerged out of Sorting and Searching all of the things on a page. The prototype is the search link in the page footer.

Wiki pages commingle content and navigation as is common with hypertext. We elevate the hypertext link by imbuing it with modest search power. Our internal links resolve in the context of the page and, through the Future plugin, the dynamic context of the neighborhood.

Links provide a curated navigational experience. The author is the curator for whom we struggle to make reorganization easy. But the author's and reader's interests might diverge. If the reader finds no linked pages attractive we then offer search to find more.

The search link enters what we could consider a recommender system. Recommendation has been made popular and then ultimately corrupted by commercial sites. Mysterious algorithms recommend. The motives of the algorithm designers are in question.

Our cautious approach to recommendation is to construct potentially useful searches expressed in legible search markup based on information in the current page. The reader wanting more can invoke any or all of them.

Aside: Our original thought was that the footer link would be titled 'more'. We reserve that word for when we understand this form of recommending better and have made it fast enough to be a regularly traveled path.

Note: We may be limiting ourselves here by thinking primarily of search. See Visualizing High-Order Graphs

Search itself can be mysterious. Google guards its algorithms as trade secret. We resort to much simpler approaches based on word search of text files which we distribute. See Search Index Downloads

Our index of item ids offers opportunity not yet seen in other hypertext systems or anywhere we've been on the internet. Item ids persist as their pages flow through the federation.

Drag and drop reorganization makes any item a marker connecting the new organization with the old. The items could be insights cast as a Paragraph, measurements cast as Data, or even previous inquiries cast as Search. If any of these were ever reused, the reuser has left a trail.

I now search for paragraphs I have just written expecting to find none. I will save that search here as if it were a program constructed by wiki on my behalf to be rerun at will for the value it provides.

At the time of writing the Search plugin consults our experimental search service. We expect that to be replaced with a faster and probably more meaningful Distributed Search. We expect the search results to evolve due to both evolution of the federation and how we choose to search it. Still, saved searches like the one above will survive these changes.