In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson defined apophenia as "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things."[3] It's an old term, coined by a psychologist in 1958, that enjoys new life in our fast, flat world. Apophenia is a type-1 error, a false positive caused by excess sensitivity. Most neurologists agree this condition exists in everyone. It's a natural bias of the human mind. We search for patterns to explain and anticipate change. On occasion, we see a new trend. Invariably, we confuse signal for noise. Apophenia is a symptom of madness and creativity. When artists, entrepreneurs, and autistic savants spot new patterns in music and markets, they walk the fine line between crazy and genius. It's a line we should all walk more.
Of course, there's value to be had in mining old patterns, as the architect Christopher Alexander eloquently intimated in The Timeless Way of Building:
"There is one timeless way of building.
It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been.
The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way."[4]
In his quest for "the quality without a name," Alexander developed a practical way to catalog patterns of behavior and design. His pattern language offered a structured method for identifying and illustrating repeatable (optimal) solutions to common problems.
This framework has been embraced in a variety of fields from ecology and education to engineering and design. Recently, we've enjoyed access to pattern libraries that help us create more useful, usable, and desirable software and interfaces. Yahoo!, in particular, has done a brilliant job of sharing patterns and code with the wider community (Figure 1-26).
Patterns embed wisdom, yet we should mind whose patterns we trust. Not all are created equal. To design well, we must understand how patterns fit together and relate to a context of use. A pattern in one scene is a problem in the next. If we aspire to innovate, we must dare to break the mold. Nobody said the timeless way was easy.
"We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe."[5]
In this task, past performance may impede future results. Therein lies the paradox of prediction. We must look back to see ahead, but as Mark Twain noted, "History doesn't repeat itself—at best it sometimes rhymes." To envision the next stanza, we might take a page from e.e. cummings, the mud-luscious poet of unconventional syntax:
"Understand the rules. Then, break them with intent."
That's the problem with the future of search. The prophets don't understand. Neither do the investors, executives, and journalists who swallow their sermons whole. Often, they don't know how search works. They rarely grok the complexity of software development, and they certainly don't understand how user psychology and behavior are related to the success or failure of search applications. So, apophenia runs rampant. It's hard to keep track of all the paradigm shifts and Google killers, especially when they fail so fast. Ironically, spin notwithstanding, the official future of search—artificial intelligence with a dash of information visualization—hasn't changed in decades. Most search startups just add new wrinkles to an old face. We're stuck on the original Star Trek, seeking technological singularity and the agents of tomorrow in a rusty rearview mirror. It's like the signs outside British pubs that promise "Free Beer Tomorrow" forever.
There is a way to break the stalemate. We can unlock the game of improve versus innovate. We can forsake the tyranny of the OR for the genius of the AND.[6] The key is vision. We must focus on the fine detail of stable patterns at the center, while keeping an eye on emerging technologies at the periphery. We must know what we see and where to look.
That's the aim of this book. It's a lens for refraction and reflection. It's a microscope, a telescope, and a kaleidoscope. By studying patterns and surveying trends, we will learn to improve and innovate. And by adding to our tools and palette, we will make search more visible and vibrant for ourselves and for those without vision. This book is a practical guide to the future, a colorful map to frameshift, and a doorstop to boot. We wrote it because the box is reshaping the globe right now. It's a topic both timely and timeless. Search is a core life activity, as ancient in its form as the trees and hills, and as our faces are. We must discover its patterns and break them with intent. Let's get cracking!