News Patterns Discovery 2: Searches Without You Needing to Type

In my previous blog, News Patterns Discovery - The Disciplined Enabling of Serendipity, I referenced a Wall Street Journal article. In this blog I will continue my reliance on the WSJ with an interview of Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. On Saturday (August 14, 2010) , the WSJ published this interview of CEO Eric Schmidt: Google and the Search for the Future conducted by Holman Jenkins. In the article, Schmidt had these things to say:

"...more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.":

These are two ideas captured by our existing News Patterns innovations.  :

* Our patterning and radars suggest interesting market events that are discovered with powerful algorithms.  Then with a single click, a user can access the desired articles that are retrieved with complex search logic.  The end result is that simple clicking results in potentially interesting or surprising articles that were not typed in as searches.  We call this process Discovery. News Patterns implements this type of "searches without you needing to type" in visual News Radar interfaces and discovery briefing email.   :

* Our algorithms also suggest what our users should look at first or "should be doing next" by first discovering patterns, then prioritizing many possible patterns to investigate.:

Beyond that sophisticated algorithms that enable the above innovations, News Patterns and Google are relying on a useful context for their users. In the above WSJ interview, Eric Schmidt uses the example of real-time proximity enabled by GPS phones, that might tie a user's needs with near locations of products or services that can satisfy those needs. In the situation of News Patterns, the context that we create regards potential market or political threats driven by rivers of news signals. By seeking relationships among many different competing factors, then alerting users when relationships might be changing or new relationships are emerging, News Patterns draws users attention to information areas that might be interpreted as threats or opportunities - without typing search terms!:

The net result is a faster and more timely provision of useful information to News Patterns users without them even knowing that they should be seeking the particular news articles.

News Patterns Discovery - The Disciplined Enabling of Serendipity

On April 5, 2010 L. Gordon Crovits wrote this article in the Wall Street Journal: The Search for Serendipity. At the time that I read this article I was nodding in agreement with this particular passage in the article:

The challenge for modern information consumers becomes: How do you discover what you don't know you want to know?

Old-time print journalists bemoan the absence of serendipity—the accidental discovery of stories that readers didn't know they were interested in reading. In the words of a recent blog post at the Nieman Journalism's Lab site, "While there is more news on the web, our perspectives on the news are narrower because we only browse the sites we already agree with, or know we already like, or care about." With newspapers, by contrast, readers discover "things we didn't care about, or didn't agree with, in the physical act of turning the page."

Part of the reason that we browse that which we are comfortable is because we as humans have a very low input bandwidth when measuring the amount of information that we can input to our conscious minds by reading. In fact this reading input rate is in the range of 200 bits per second. Consider this 200 bits per second as glacially slow when considering that our minds input graphical information at the rate of 10,000,000 bits per second. There is little wonder why we soon fatigue when exposed to the huge volumes of text news information that are at the other ends of search queries and alerts. By returning to sites that we agree with, as stated by Nieman Journalism lab, we are actually employing a strategy of using scarce information input bandwidth. It takes far less energy to read something with which we agree, than information that challenges our beliefs.

In our News Patterns world, we enable greater serendipity by converting large volumes of news information into graphical patterns. It is the visual pattern that incites the interest of our users. By intention, some patterns look threatening, new, and unexpected. Once a pattern has earned the attention of our users, he/she can easily drill beneath the surface to the actual news articles defining the graphical pattern. Like scanning a news paper, News Patterns users scan large volumes of news data, quickly bypassing some information while focusing on others, all without a forced reading of too many individual article details.

With such a graphical scanning process supported by algorithmic patterning processes that discover patterns of probable interest to our users, we empower them to a superior situational awareness of the here and now, and enable them to transcend comfortable sources with discovery or serendipity.