I’ve been thinking about my fantasy search engine would look like, and somehow when I saw this Miller Lite commercial it hit me on what I want my search engine to do. Watch this 30 second ad… then stay with me as I explain….
Until the guy raises the beer, it looks like an e E-Harmony commercial, right?? That’s what got me thinking.
[Note: Suspend your ‘privacy’ fears for a few minutes and think that you are living in a ‘perfect world.’ After all, this is why I called this my “fantasy search engine.”]
If taking a long survey like e-harmony helps connect you to those that fit your personality, can’t something like that be set up to find the news, web pages, and other content that best fits your needs?
There could be an actual “survey” conducted (for the sake of simplicity, let’ call the product “E-Googley“), but a long survey could be supplemented by:
  1. indexing your Twitter (and other social media) posts, the URL’s you post on Twitter, and who you choose to follow on Twitter (and any other social media that is relevant to your search preferences like LinkedIn, MH Connected, etc.)
  2. indexing your blog (if applicable)
  3. submitting any personal writings you’ve done
  4. embedded cookies that follow your browsing preferences (sites that you bookmark, or go to without being prompted from an RSS feed or other reference point)
  5. ranking of items returned in your results (kind of like the Pandora “thumbs up”, “thumbs down” ranking… simple, but effective
Taking all of this information should help the magical E-Googley system start to weight the results you get from your newsfeeds, readers, web searching, etc. – PLUS should start suggesting new items that you should follow and what existing items you should drop off your lists.
Here’s the catch phrase:

E-Googley – We’ll help you find “the one” you need now… and keep a look out for “the one” you’d like to meet later.

This week, Bing added support from Wolfram Alpha, and Google added data from the World Bank to help improve the “data” is supplies for the search results, but I want these search engines to not only work on the backend data, I want it to get to know me better and the kind of results I want to meet. I’m sure with all the cash that Google or Bing has (although e-Bingley doesn’t seem to have the same ring to it..) either could pony up a few million for the E-Harmony survey algorithms and make my dreams come true of a search engine that is truly “The One.”