The Last Mile of Search.

Filed under: search

“Oh, just Google it!” is the answer I often get when I can’t find something online. Sad to say, even with Google taking over the world, it can’t find everything. I could easily spend all day searching the wonders of the internet but where do I store what I find? What happens if I find something that may seem irrelevant, but I need it later on down the line? Sure there are web services that enable you to customize search (Rollyo and Google Custom Search come to mind) which are all “personalized” to some extent. I’m all for social bookmarking sites, using various add-ons to Firefox to quickly add to del.icio.us or Digg or what have you. But still there is something big lacking.

There is this term, “last mile”, which although has to do with actual physical connectivity, it also has to do with end users of the internet since it’s the part that affects individuals most directly. Even if you have no problem with Google owning your browsing history, bookmarks, and identity, there are still strong reasons why there should be a “last mile” of search. Without a high level of control over the search and browsing environment, allowing *bottom up innovation*, search will only get more personalized, it will never get personal.

And thankfully, that’s exactly what SupraSphere does: complete control over your searches.

I was talking to David today, about Dell of all things, and then I did a “SupraSearch” to find absolutely everything involving Dell that we had ever talked about for as long as I’ve been using SS. Here is what I thought was cool, the fact that I could choose what type of communication to search through. I set it to search for “dell” through all available message types, and up popped a dozen or so matches, including a few bookmarks and an email. Now I could have narrowed it down more, but since I’d never *really* used it, I just wanted to see what would come up.

If you take a look at the image to the left here, *points enthusiastically* we have the search box that comes up and you can see the options I have as a user to do the search for Dell. This way I can find the exact instance I want. If I just wanted to see the bookmarks, I could check just the bookmark option. Now, what happens with the results? A new tab is opened up revealing the results that have hyperlinks back to the original communication.

This will vastly improve web-browsing in general because of the easy searching of literally thousands (at least in my case, lol) of bookmarks, not to mention the logging of all messages in your various spheres. I happen to lose things easily, but this way we’ll never lose any communications!