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There are many ways to find things. For example: you may find something lovely or delicious. One of my favorite corollaries of Murphy’s Laws is that you will always find something in the last place that you look for it.

This week Danny Sullivan appeared on the TWiT podacst, describing how in his humble opinion Google is no longer a search engine. I am very happy that he has finally gotten with the program!

Finally Mr. Sullivan admits that now all websites are equal — now all websites are “search engines“. At this rate, he ought to be able to declare that he, too, thinks that one-size fits-all search engines are dead before the end of the year (that is, if the world still exists then). I have been saying this for many years, but that is beside the point.

When I wrote the Wisdom of the Language (about 5 years ago), I was primarily thinking of the way we have traditionally searched for (and hopefully find) information. I am not ready to give up on this methodology quite yet (indeed, I still find that this is the primary way search [aka "information retrieval"] works).

But in the meantime I have also learned a couple “new tricks”. The first trick is one I saw on the horizon when I wrote that article — and it has since then become for all practical purposes the standard trick: “search engine optimization” has given rise to the “promotional link”. What I mean by promotional link is a link that does not replace the traditional footnote — instead, the promotional link merely says something like “buy now” (it makes no statement about what it links to other than to say “you should do this”).

Traditionally, footnotes and links had been only (or at least primarily) been used to dispay sources of information (and disinformation). With the rise of the promotional link (largely due to the configuration of Google’s “secret” algorithm), search results turned into spam pages. Since then Google has changed — and not just a couple weeks ago. When Google rolled out their “new and improved” Google community promotional plus search engine, I noted right away that Google has already been promoting mainstream media for many years — for example with their “news” and/or “video” promotional search tools.

Now, with their plus promotional search engine, Google has essentially become a spammer community. Like the reporters in the TWiT podcast said: If you want to show up on Google results, you should join all the other spammers in the plus search engine optimization community! WOOHOO!!

But I digress — let me get back to finding methods. We had the traditional (“research”) method of finding sources, now Google is pushing the idea of finding promotions / promotional material,… — what other finding methods exist? I am not sure, but let me try a couple guesses.

In my opinion, guessing is actually a good tip: one way of finding something is by “incentivizing”. I can find chocolate lovers by giving away free chocolate. This is probably closely related to the whole “gamification” idea, but I think I am not a good enough expert on that topic to really know for sure.

Another way of finding might be to join a club or a community with a certain set of ethics. I presume Christians will tend to find things differently than Muslims or Buddhists — again: I’m not sure,… it’s just a hunch.

Similarly people who enjoy mathematics may find different things than people who enjoy art or music.

Perhaps women will find things differently than men. Perhaps boys and girls will use different finding methods (and find different findings) than old folks.

I am quite sure that the number of finding methods is nearly infinite — what do you think?

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