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Thoughts that crossed my mind after reading marginalia's post:
Whatever Happened to the Memex?
I have always found that linking chunks of knowledge ends up being a lot more difficult that it initially appeared. Relationships between ideas just seem hard to pin down and stick to consistently, and hard to make sense of when I come back to them at a later date, maybe in a different frame of mind.
I think when we have to do our own 'meta', our brains get distracted from the actual subject. Arbitrary associations quickly become mentally expensive. Linking has to be managed for us, and automated where possible. Search has to understand context, and then help us find our way to that context - an isolated paragraph means little until our brains are primed for its context.
Like when someone utters a sentence out of the blue, and we race to figure out how to interpret it. It becomes obvious once we have context. Sometimes we need our memory jogged, we get told the context of the sentence before we can interpret it.
If we're researching a terrible storm, perhaps we're want to read about all terrible weather, maybe all terrible things, and the adjective is the central focus. Or maybe the noun is the central focus, and we want to read about all storms, terrible or otherwise. Perhaps it's specifically terrible storms we want, or we just want to identify a particular terrible storm.
Language, grammar, and thought are so intimately related that I think any useful search in this area needs to allow us to intuitively express these things. One crude way to achieve this might be to offer results from varied contexts, and allow us to home in on results that 'jump out at us'.
On a more fundamental level, I think that modern Internet culture limits our ability to exploit knowledge in any novel ways.
Most knowledge is held by people who don't want to share it. They just want to extract revenue from it. They guard it to ensure that access is only available via revenue-generating channels.
The web was conceived as a way to organise and share information and, for want of a better expression, they have shit all over it. They trick people into contributing their time writing and moderating information, then they exploit it in any way they choose to the exlusion of everyone else.
Looking up the word 'hyper' using a text-based browser almost exemplified this perfectly. Cambridge Dictionary was woeful. Merriam-Webster was merely terrible. A dictionary is possibly the most profoundly apt use of hypertext, and even they fucked it up. The resulting pages were a mix of definition fragments, interspersed with shambolic crud:
"We and our partners care about your privacy"
"Keep scrolling for more"
"Click here for our latest word games!"
We need to 'pirate' the best bits of the web. The current custodians have proved themselves unworthy of that role.