Skip to main content

Humans Suck at Predicting the Future

I really liked this post from Chris Fralic, which points us to all the awesome predictions of things that were supposed to happen in the Internet in 1995:
"Gopher. The lower-profile poor cousin from outta town, the media has been so absorbed in the publishing potential of Mosaic that it hasn't noticed the continued, and dramatic, growth of this easier-to-use; albeit less visually sexy; alternative. One key difference: I can always find what I want in Gopherspace with only a step or two."
Yeah - that Mosaic thing was really a flash in the pan... Still, one other prediction caught my eye:
"The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source."
Hey! - I remember all that 'Agent ' talk - (wasn't that where Clippy came from?) But this question reminded me of something I found in HTTPSpace much more recently - Hakia.

Hakia claims to be a "meaning based" search engine, and you know it's not half bad. For instance, try the results to both of those far-off zany impossible questions:
You'll find the correct answers easily - first hit, first page. It's not perfect - but it certainly is intriguing. Mind you, Google does a better job than Hakia, no doubt - I don't even have to leave the search result page to get the answers....Truth be told, I don't know if I'd pick "Internet Search" for my first start-up venture...Having said that, I find myself constantly returning to it, which I guess is a sign that it must be kind of good.

It's no "Intelligent Agent", but I guess I've always got Search Dog for that...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide) TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it. In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on. ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernat...
2 comments
Read more

Considerably smaller than Texas...

Well, after jonron 's nagging, I figured I better post something! It's weird - being so far away from home and in such a strange foreign place - you'd think that I'd have all kinds of things to say, but in truth most of the time I'm either so busy with work that I don't have time to post, or so lonely that I don't want to burden you all with my misery... (sob!) Anyway - I'm currently posting from the Best Western Hotel in Corpus Christi, Texas . (We have a TRIM Customer here who needs some help with configuring their records management system, so Simon and I have been helping out. ) I'm not sure that I'd ever want to stay at the Worst Western. Or even the Average Western, but no matter... Texas has been a pretty entertaining place to visit. Our efforts at finding a place to park ended in a church parking lot where the sign said "Clergy Only - Sinners Will be Prosecuted (and towed)" When we finally found the office, there was another gi...
1 comment
Read more

The height of Retro cool?

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...
2 comments
Read more