View from the Corner Office: SeeqPod
Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines, we make a virtual visit to the executive offices of an alternative search engine.
Today we pay a visit to the headquarters of SeeqPod, to catch up with Kasian Franks, co-founder and CEO.
Better Search Through Biomimetics
I ask myself this question frequently: Why is it that more effort has not been put into getting machines to process information similar to the way humans do? The human brain is the best pattern matcher and search engine in existence. Its a wonder more search engine technologists are not mimicking the process of human cognition, which by the way does not operate based on a series of linguistic words and rules and does not start out dependent on a language.
The only way advancements in search technology can be made is by studying the way you and I conduct a search for something. If we look at what is involved in this process it is clearly not based on matching keywords and a handful of context. When humans search for something they leverage mass amounts of temporal, spatial and associative data to find things that are most likely what they are looking for.
There are two more things that need to be optimized related to search: the over-weighted focus on speed and number of results. Do we really need 252,233,875 results for the term “clothing” returned in .09 seconds? I and others I know would rather have 20-30 results returned in a reasonable amount of time and the results being similar to those as if I asked a human to collect the most relevant ones for me.
A biomimetic approach to the science and practical application of search is necessary. We do this in other areas such as robotics and in materials science, why not in the area of search engine technology? Some of the near term goals in the industry of Search should be to A) operate in a language-independent way, B) determine how objects are related, leveraging the same context a human brain might generate C) determine how strong the relationships are between the objects, and D) the type of context they relate themselves, in emulation of biomimetic object-association strategies, has proven to be very effective in relationship discovery and mining, leading to new findings in numerous industries including life sciences, finance, search, and contextual advertising.
Not to mention, music! This can be observed by going to www.seeqpod.com.
Have you missed a “Corner Office View?”
Here are the offices we’ve been to so far:
