Information Discovery over Information Organization

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

How are organization and discovery related?

Organization facilitates discovery, but we don’t know how much it’s facilitated unless we know the granularity and quality of the organization.

An example:

Thanks to Mr. Dewey, card catalogues organize all the books in a library. That’s a great first step. If we need to find information that might be contained in one of those books, the card catalogue should yield a short list of possible candidates. We can then use those books’ indices to narrow our search. And finally, we just need to read each potentially relevant section. Laborious, but effective.

If that same library were 100% digital, and if those books’ content were indexed as a whole, a single query would yield the same result in seconds. In fact, most query languages get us way beyond a static book index since they allow us to search for phrases, and they allow us to conditionally include or exclude words from our search.  This technology is available to anyone today.

The big search engines are taking the idea of facilitating discovery even further by considering a query’s context. They take the query’s author into account, her preferences, habits, and location, for example. They also take macro context into account, such as the time of day and the other “trending” queries. If I search for “Isis violence” on Google, my results will be different from your results. Mine should be more relevant to me, and yours to you.

Facilitating discovery seems like a great thing. It not only saves us time, but also allows us to find information that we might not have been able to find without such a sophisticated infrastructure.

There are, however, some downsides to this ease of discovery, the primary one being lack of stickiness. As I pointed out in personal blog post a couple months ago, easy learning is easily forgotten. But does that really matter if the same information can be retrieved again, at any time?

On the whole, the benefits of easy discovery and retrieval so far outweigh the downsides, that – to put it nicely – only the most nostalgic amongst us could be against it!

In fewer than 20 years, Google and its ilk have changed information discovery forever. Faster discovery yields faster knowledge transfer which in turn yields faster invention. There is absolutely no doubt that the rate of innovation is increasing, and that rate is directly linked to the speed at which we can find the information we want.