SEARCH ENGINES - An Inconvenient Truth

Sometimes a search engine just won't do. Do anything to save you time from searching for 'the' right answer from the million of little blue links that pop-up like weeds. And 'most of us will readily exchange a few kilowatts of accuracy for several hours of additional investigation'.

Because clutter is something that we put up with, the way we put up with bad governments, global warming and often the purgatory office coffee. Not me. Not anymore. I mean, put up with global warming or clutter.

Like most people, for me the buck stopped at wearing a green t-shirt. But then I started working for a company, that like me is genuine about wanting to do the right thing, TigerLogic. They had yolink - a little search prodigy - green to its last links and associations.

The idea was simple. Let's weed out the search results and also give people the opportunity to save more than just time. By tying up with Google Docs, Evernote, Diigo, Del.i.cious and more, the 'yolink save green community' was growing with the best. So in a small, yet big way, the savvy searcher was saving time,information and the paper.

Perhaps a better reference would be Jon Stewart, talking to Gore about the latter's new book: "I took this course over the weekend, read through the book, learned an awful lot... still don't know what to do... Even if you are, as I am, someone who believes the science, just because if I see something in print it must be true, but I believe, ok, the world is warming... surely human activity must have an impact on the world. There are 6 billion of us and, you know, many of us live in paved areas, so of course... But it seems like we won't change, you know; we didn't switch from horses until we got cars. I almost feel like, when you say we have all these different choices we can do... just give us one. Just say, 'We're switching to geothermal and we're doing it tomorrow and here's how we're doing it..." Sometimes, we forget that the big picture is actually comprised of small pixels. We are each tools for making a difference.

So yea. There are atleast 3 billion of us on search engines, everyday. And if each one of us just said, "hell yea, we're switching to yolink 'save and share' and we are doing it today.Now. Can you count the number of trees you just saved?

Think. 'Coz right now, wasting just won't do. Keep that green shirt on folks, and click here to save a tree.

Until later, green out folks!

Search.Find.Create.

Can we make search Green?

Recently Mama Nature has been creating havoc. Looking at the situation at hand, I did some yolinking and realized that in the matter of 2 months, we had 3 earthquakes over 7.0 on the Richter Scale, couple of freeloading tsunamis, one big Euro storm and as of right now, freak land-slides that wiped out four entire villages in Uganda. Yes four entire communities – the old, young and the smart. Gone. Someone please call Al gore and find out who the hell slipped up.

Not to mention the snow storms battering our east-coastians. Are we misreading the little signs? Maybe the real and the digital worlds are not that far apart. Earth, like search engines, is a big body of information. But weeding out the wrong information, and to get to what we are looking for isn’t simple.

In case of search engines, Yolink usually scans and highlights all the search keywords within the neighborhood of a paragraph. Then presents it as a preview to us. EX: You could choose – ‘Scan –links’ and ‘find – earthquakes history global warming freak weather’. I would throw in ‘Al Gore’ as a search keyword for good measure and see what results I get.

And I get to the right information from links scanned in a matter of minutes. We got digital covered. But M.Nature has the information links embedded in that large body we call ‘world’. Searching those is not easy.

We have got to start paying attention. What are you doing in your bit for the world? I, for one, use yolink’s online 'save and share'. Meaning, I utilize Google Docs and Evernote integrations to save my information, instead of printing pages of this and that.

I don’t know about you, but one thing about the Chinese is that they’re usually brilliant in their calculations. And that 2012 thing seems ominously real.
So while we are trying to figure out the world, lets keep it green people. Lets keep it green.