Finding, not Searching. The Theory of Answers.

Answer Theory
June 17, 2013

The question throughout human history has been how to find relevant information in the shortest amount of time; basically, to find the answer. I have always argued that people want to find the answer, not search.

The simplest solution has been to collect the information in some type of storage, memory, cave paintings, books, video, hard drives. And to pass that information from one person to another, via language, airwaves and networks, both social and digital. Currently "The Cloud" and "The Internet" seem to be the storage and information transit solutions.

Finding the answer from older storage solutions, like memory, books and even older computer mainframes required hours of manual labor, usually via an expert in the field, even after computers made information correlation faster and easier, still experts were required to find and provide answers. And these methods to supply answers were very expensive.

Ways to use the internet to generate answers evolved from the basic search functions, providing lists of links that anyone could view and determine which pieces were relevant, one distinction was that the question had to be asked, the other was that the links used very little information about who was asking the question. Probably the most used way to answer questions still in use, almost unchanged since Yahoo!

Some search engines use people to determine what the most likely searches people are making and tailor the results, like ask.com.

Social Information systems usually generate answers before requested based on a users biases and those of their friends. For example sending information on a concert before you even knew they were on tour. You no longer have to wait for an MTV news update. While being predictive social media sites generate noise, not every update is valuable information.

Hybrid answers are generated by combining the search methodology with social networking, having a user's search results influenced by their social media contacts, past searches and even current location. Google has various solutions which provide argumentatively better results using these methods.

A future successful version of the answer system would have less noise than social media systems, but provide relevant answers before a user asks. Google Now appears to do this by taking the most asked questions and dynamically providing the answer at the correct time, such as, "What will my commute home be like?"

And other solutions will use the phonemes from our searches to search youtube videos, music, tv shows and movies to provide better answers and better answer format. Of course this may bring an end to the #hashtag.

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