“Do You Know Anything About...”

Today someone asked me, "Do you know anything about taking a set of information and processing it in a way that makes it more useful to the user?"

This was from someone who was really struggling to to find the right way to ask me something for which he had almost no terminology. Still, I had to shake my head a little before replying, "Some (myself included) would say that you've just defined programming, at least partially."

Don't snicker. The question comes from someone in a field which is suffering from extreme information overload, and he personally has a chronic case. He's tired of asking a computer to search for something and then having to manually search through the results. His frustration comes from all the questions that arise from "search."

What if one of the words I used to narrow my search is missing from a key article? Why can't I search for subjects, topics, or ideas, instead of just searching for words? Why do I have to re-search for every form of a word?

I feel his pain.