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Google knows that search solves pretty much all of these knowledge management issues. But there are deep conflicts of interest, and curious corporate blind spo

Google knows that search solves pretty much all of these knowledge management issues. But there are deep conflicts of interest, and curious corporate blind spots to solving this individually. So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of everything I have viewed (ok maybe not those sites) - so I an do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was first ever". Partly because if I had that on my local disk I would not need to go to the google home page. More fairly that particular search has been followed by X thousand previous people and Voogle knows how many ended up finding something useful. But this does not solve for Outlook. The second biggest search opportunity surely is corporate emails. Gmail must have shown the outlook product managers how to do search ... 15 years ago. Yet it is still clunky unintuitive slow and frequently wrong.

eightysixfour 5y ago
> So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of everything I have viewed (ok maybe not those sites) - so I an do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was first ever". This existed for a bit, it was a Chrome extension called Memex. They pivoted to social bookmarks and it absolutely crushed me losing it. I had become very used to only needing to remember a few keywords from something I’d read in the past and then being able to rapidly finhd it.
luckydata 5y ago
Google has one of the most severe knowledge management issues I've experienced in my career and search is not very helpful in taming it. I'm not convinced that's a good example.
deckard1 5y ago
I've written pretty much your same comment a few times on HN in the past. The web browser could be a provider of rich personal context. Firefox is probably in the best position to take advantage of this. But they, too, are dependent on Google (>80% of revenue is Google). Apple doesn't care enough about search or the web to pursue this. Which leaves... open source? Some fringe startup? I'm not hopeful anyone will tackle this problem soon. We've known bookmarks are not the solution for over two decades now. > The second biggest search opportunity surely is corporate emails. This has largely been solved in a roundabout way by Slack. They didn't solve email or search. They just made email completely irrelevant at orgs that use Slack and their search interface, while not perfect, does an okay job. They only succeeded because email is so bad in contrast.

eightysixfour 5y ago

> So why don't all my web browser keep a complete copy of everything I have viewed (ok maybe not those sites) - so I an do a text search for "that thing about female doctor who was first ever". This existed for a bit, it was a Chrome extension called Memex. They pivoted to social bookmarks and it absolutely crushed me losing it. I had become very used to only needing to remember a few keywords from something I’d read in the past and then being able to rapidly finhd it.

luckydata 5y ago

Google has one of the most severe knowledge management issues I've experienced in my career and search is not very helpful in taming it. I'm not convinced that's a good example.

deckard1 5y ago

I've written pretty much your same comment a few times on HN in the past. The web browser could be a provider of rich personal context. Firefox is probably in the best position to take advantage of this. But they, too, are dependent on Google (>80% of revenue is Google). Apple doesn't care enough about search or the web to pursue this. Which leaves... open source? Some fringe startup? I'm not hopeful anyone will tackle this problem soon. We've known bookmarks are not the solution for over two decades now. > The second biggest search opportunity surely is corporate emails. This has largely been solved in a roundabout way by Slack. They didn't solve email or search. They just made email completely irrelevant at orgs that use Slack and their search interface, while not perfect, does an okay job. They only succeeded because email is so bad in contrast.