Filter Failure: Rescued By Visual Search

摘要

Increasingly, online information is escaping the text trap and being presented in visual terms. Think about things such as newspaper "infographics," car navigation systems, and iTunes' Cover Flow display. Humans are fundamentally highly visual creatures; sight is our primary sense, integral to how we think. The digital world is only now catching up to our abilities to quickly analyze and make sense of the visual. Even people who love searching the internet admit that sometimes there's just too much of it. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by 805 million Google, Yahoo!, or MSN Live Search results. In many ways, the same phenomenon applies to searching library collections. Libraries don't usually have 805 million items, but they still have a lot of materials on many topics. Thanks to technology, we have virtually unlimited storage and processing power-online, via the cloud, and on our personal devices. Working with (and trying to make sense of) large amounts of data is now firmly in the grasp of everyone. Online visualization tools are popping up that are so easy to use that anyone can create a word cloud. Visual search has come to the masses.