It039s Not A Search. It039s A Question.

2011-11-07

Siri is now fully ingrained in my workflow. I use it at home and on the street constantly. It greatly reduces the time to conceive an idea, research it and then get it written down.

Something that I am noticing though is that I no longer need to think about where or how to search. I don’t care. I just want the information and an assurance that the source is reasonably authoritative. I get that with Siri. Right now the service pulls results from two primary buckets: Wolfram Alpha and Yahoo. Weather and Stock information comes from Yahoo. All factual data comes from Wolfram Alpha. Everything else is deferred to a classic web search using Google. I am really getting accustomed to how little I need to think about the mechanics of searching. I rarely need to consider syntax or boolean operators. Do I try Google and Bing or stick with DuckDuckGo? Siri has made me care less. It really frees my mind to think about applying the information rather than how to dig for it.

The majority of time I spend searching on the Internet is spent sifting through garbage. Digging for gold hidden in piles of link-bait filth. It turns out that I don’t need the absolute best result most of the time. I just need something that answers my question.

I hope this is the future of search. I know it would likely destroy Google, but that’s their problem. I’m selfish that way. They need to figure out how to make their business model giving answers instead of doing searches. A process where I never see a logo of a search engine. I just see my answer.

Here’s some of the handy and funny information available through Siri: