The spectral colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are produced by light of a single wavelength, and are all visible to the human eye, except for indigo, which most people can't distinguish. Isaac Newton included indigo so the number of colors would match the number of known planets, notes in a major scale, and days in a week. Of course, any list of colors is arbitrary in a spectrum of infinite variation. Colors are categories we use to explain what we see and, in the case of ultraviolet and infrared, what we don't. We even have imaginary colors like octarine, the eighth color, an elusive spectral mix that's hard to describe and impossible to perceive. That's the thing about color. Try describing a rainbow or a sunset to a blind person or ask a synesthete to tell you about the sound of blue or the color of Monday.[2] Most of us are unable to fully accept or appreciate this cross-sensory perception. We have to see to believe.
Figure 1-19. Newton's color wheel, showing the colors correlated with musical notes and symbols for the known bodies within the solar system
The same holds true in search. We have a number of well-established categories: web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time. Within each category, we embrace a set of proven technologies, business models, user behaviors, and best practices. We are mostly blind to the chaotic yet colorful array of search startups and design patterns dancing on the horizon. There are so many possible futures for search and discovery, and it's hard to discern good ideas from bad. In the 1990s, folks laughed at a startup named GoTo and the absurd idea of paid search. Meanwhile, people raved about PointCast. Push was the next big thing. Until it wasn't. We've made many mistakes and it's tempting to give up. Why engage a future so unevenly distributed? It's safe to be a skeptic, so we stay within our category and copy the competition. We test and refine, we celebrate incremental improvement, and we laugh at the latest big idea for reinventing search. "What a joke! That'll never work." Again, we have to see to believe.
Inevitably, this insularity leads to a category error. We omit a key feature because "that won't fly in the enterprise." We miss the next Twitter because "that's not search." This is why it's so important to look beyond our borders. The enterprise can learn from e-commerce. We must simply adjust for different constraints, metrics, and goals. It's equally vital to reorganize. Like colors, our categories are arbitrary by nature. We organize to understand, and we must reorganize to see anew.
For instance, there's clear value in naming the primary colors of search. This classification provides a quick way to reference the major categories and key players. It helps us explain the market dynamics and business strategies behind divergent search solutions. And, as the color wheel illustrates beautifully, it offers a glimpse of the brilliant diversity of search.
This is not a pure organization. On the contrary, it's a loose grab bag of context, purpose, and platform. Yet it still belies the true chaos of the marketplace for discovery. We Yahoo! on the iPhone and use Google Desktop to query web history. We search social conversations threaded over applications, channels, languages, and time zones for embedded links that connect to any media. Search won't fit cleanly on a color wheel. In fact, these categories reveal more about the history of search than its future.
Today, search is best imagined as an artist's palette, as shown in Figure 1-21. The mixing of colors has begun. Lovely hues and shades exist outside the categories. We can see them better when we shuffle our ways of organizing. For instance, there are riches within the niches of format.
In images, we find the photo facets of Getty, the interestingness of Flickr, and the visual recognition of Like.com, which lets us search and shop by color, shape, and pattern.
In music, Songza turns the results interface into a jukebox, Midomi lets us search by singing, and Last.fm spins our personal channel into a melody of social discovery.
In video, Everyzing unlocks the vault with its speech-to-text translation technology, while NetFlix, Hulu, and Boxee search together and apart for the future and end of TV.
We can also organize by subject and industry, taking a close look at search verticals like health, travel, and real estate. Or we can sort by approach, focusing on text analytics, clustering, question answering, personalization, visualization, or rich results. Each organizational scheme adds combinatorial possibilities to our palette. Desktop search is social and personal. It's not about the desktop. Music is mobile. There's video in every vertical. The potential for cross-fertilization is huge. Diversity is the inexorable result of search.
As designers, we can learn from each color and combination. Many ideas work once, or never, but there are patterns of behavior and design that bridge contexts. In this book, that's our target: we will aim to explore core concepts and best practices by studying examples drawn from within and between contexts. And we will repeatedly try to escape the category. What kinds of information and objects are unsearchable? What, if anything, will never be subject to search? What can we learn from asking, browsing, and filtering? Where is the boundary between search and unsearch? To think outside the box, we will search beyond the periphery. Sometimes we must look away to see.
[2] Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second pathway, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color. People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.