A simple answer:
We need another search engine?
We hear that question a lot and it’s not new. It’s been asked of Google, Yahoo and of just about everyone who’s ever made a search engine since CERN and Tim Berners Lee (pre-1993).
Yes, we do, is our answer. Things have changed, things are changing more, and search needs to change with them.
Results from the current search engines are too often wasting our time by making it too slow to get to the highest relevancy content, whatever that may be.
The Why
TL:DR version
Current search engines are slowing us down, for a variety of reasons. They make it too slow to…
This is how we make it different
How Big Is Search?
It seems an amazing claim, and it’s true: search is the largest market in the history of the world. Let’s look at large numbers for a moment.
Any given day these days Big Search is serving up around 7.5 billion searches per day (see the current count here: https://www.internetlivestats.com/) and that number is likely far from the total number of searches done on a daily basis. It doesn’t count voice search (siri, alexa, etc), nor searches done on other platforms such as Wikipedia or LexisNexis.
There could easily be 15 billion searches on any given day, and that number will…
Off antidepressants for the first time in 25 years
Author’s note: I am a 30-year meditator and diagnosed as depressed, dysthymic, a General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) sufferer, and ADD for many years. Meditation has proven over time to offer the best relief of anything any doctor, caretaker, therapist, or anything anyone else has provided or suggested. Here’s what I sense is going on.
The Good News
For anyone reading this who also suffers with depression, or any mental health issue along the depression-anxiety-addiction axis, this is going to be very good news and very bad news simultaneously.
The good news came to me in a strong epiphany very recently. Now, this may…
It is vital now. How it happens matters.
About search from the notebook of Adam Gordon, CEO, Plumb.one.
The web and digital tech today
The web is at least 5.7 billion pages already and, depending on who you ask, every day there are more; between 25,000 and 721,000. About 56 million pages. Give or take.
Much of the current human conversation is happening digitally and a high percentage of humanity’s collected wisdom and history is has been recorded digitally and is available over the internet.
Digital technologies have been woven into our lives to such an extent that, for most of us, just living life without…
After so many years, why can’t we get it right?
SERP is an acronym for Search Engine Results Page. When you search for something, the resulting list of links shown is known as a SERP, and there is a lot of jockeying done to get placed high on those pages.
Search Today
As all of us here are, more than likely, long time denizens of the Internet. We have seen search evolve from extremely primitive to the complex, interactive, data-driven, service that it is today. Always there on some of our phones, and rarely more than a click, swipe, or gesture away. …
American Politics, Abortion, and Why to Have Hope
There is little disagreement that the idea that the world today is a pretty screwed-up place. Very anxiety-filled. Loss of hope about the future. Rabid tribalism, economic inequities, racial inequalities, rampant capitalism doing what it was designed to do; increase capital, rather than support people, protect the environment, or anything else.
But why? Why is it like that? And why, recently, does it appear to be getting worse?
The Donald (said in a facetious tone) and his whole gang of short-term thinkers is an easy answer, too easy to be more than a little correct.
I propose that part of…
A story way beyond us
Author’s Note
For this essay I refer to God with the English objective pronouns: they and them (and no, not capitalized). Until someone can convince me that God has a gender or anything else we use to describe ourselves, it’s as close as I think we can get in English. My apologies if this distresses any reader.
In the beginning…
We are puny-yet-arrogant beings.
We are so puny-yet-arrogant that for a while we thought that we were close to knowing just about everything about how the universe works. …
Maybe we don’t have to, maybe there’s a better way
The state we get in when we meditate
The not-quite-sleep state
Or the mostly sleep state
Or, perhaps, even the sleep state (presuming that mediation-sleep is different than sleep-sleep, which is my experience)
We/some call it unconsciousness or semi-consciousness
I don’t think so
I think it’s a lie our egos tell us
I think it’s, if anything, hyperconscious
More connected to whatever-you-want-to-call-it (the divine, god, the universe…)
It’s not UNconscious
It’s egoless (or, ego-reduced) consciousness
All of our individual egos and whatever group ego there might be have a HUGE stake in us not believing this
Our ego carries our…
Debunking one of internet marketing’s most pervasive myths
It’s been a truism on the web for millions of years of internet-time. “Content is king.”
It’s nonsense. Don’t believe a word of it.
Context rules all.
Content derives a large part of its meaning from its context, so if you control the context, you can have an outsized effect on the meaning of any content. Any content.
In an Orwellian fashion, you can change black to white while even suppressing the knowledge that it’s being done. It’s a scarily powerful way to influence people.
Killing your mother, for instance, is generally regarded as a bad thing. Give it the…
A question to get you beyond your ego
My internal landscape is so much larger than it used to be. I feel like the Tardis now, bigger on the inside than on the outside. The people who follow me (bless you all) know that I have been meditating for 30 years and I write in the hopes that it can help other people walk the path and achieve what many meditative philosophies say is a waypoint; being able to be an observer inside one’s own head.
A few years ago my internal map “zoomed out,” so that the depression, addiction, and anxiety that were most of my inner…
