Personalized Search

April 03, 2012 •

I have a great idea for a search engine to implement. I have multiple tools at my disposal for trying to remember stuff that is on the Internet. I can make a bookmark in my web browser. I can use a tool like Instapaper. For programming, I can make a question and answer on Stack Overflow. But these are all a bunch of data silos. I can’t readily search across all of them. And if I forget where I read that one article … did I archive it on Instapaper? Did I drop it into Evernote? I have a solution …

I want the search engines to provide a way for me to mark something as of “personal interest” to me. Then when I search for something, it will rank my personal interest items alongside everything else, but give my personal interest items a boost in the rankings. Or maybe just list them off to the side in a kind of, “Hey, I noticed you’re searching for information on Git, it looks like you have a guide to Git bookmarked and it looks like it has the information you’re looking for.”

I would have to sign up for an account with the search engine of my choice for this to work, because I would want my “personal interest” items available no matter which machine I was logged into. But, for this feature, I would gladly do so. I would also like this to be an API that any service across the Internet could use. So Evernote could submit my notes to the API. Instapaper could submit my articles to the API. Perhaps it could even boost the accuracy of the ranking systems the algorithmic search engines use because it would be another source of data separate from links between web pages.

Anyway … Google? Bing? Either of you listening? Whichever one implements this to my satisfaction first wins my business.