Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Information has always been searchable. What I really want is information that is findable.

Search is a topic that has plagued and payed computer scientists since anyone was first called a computer scientist. I studied search back when I was in college (we used punch card machines back then and wrote on cave walls with soft rocks).

In a recent job, we would have “data calls” where someone way up in the upper levels of organizations with too many upper levels of managers would ask a vague question. We knew the answer. We knew we had seen the answer in a good chart or graph. We just had to find that answer in the vast network of folders and files. One hour to understand the question; thirty-nine hours of searching for that one chart or graph.

God bless the folks at Microsoft who put search into the File Finder or whatever they call that software. Same to the folks at Apple with their Finder. Odd how they use the word “Finder” when finding is a prediction of the result of Searching. Often, finding was an overly optimistic prediction of what happened when searching.

We don’t want searching; we want finding. Is it fishing or is it catching fish? Is it catching fish or is it eating fresh fish?

Today, we have better tools. I am more apt to find at the end of all that searching. Good. Is this quibbling about words? Perhaps it is using words that mean something—saying what we mean and meaning what we say and all that. We can do better.