November 15, 2001
An indispensable fuzzy search tool.
Earlier today, I struck a blank. I was urgently making a point in an email, and wanted to compare flash guru yugop with another artistic technologist and design celebrity John Maeda. But for the life of me, I couldn't recall the name John Maeda, even though I knew it was on the tip of my tongue. I kept thinking of another designer du jour, Bruce Mau (beautifully lampooned on textism.com). But I knew it wasn't him.
This was a conundrum not even Google could solve for me. How do I find out the name of the well-known designer or artistic technologist whose name is reminiscent of Bruce Mau? AskJeeves? Don't make me laugh.
The solution? Amazon. People who bought/liked Bruce Mau also bought/liked, among others, John Maeda.
I found this quite an epiphany. The main reason it worked, of course, was the fact that both are currently trendy designers, but what other search engine could've done this for me? Amazon work hard at personalisation technology and an assistive shopping tool, and end up creating an excellent general-purpose "related concepts" search engine! And I wasn't even interested in books!
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