I think how search works is going to change, so.. if I were developing a class around this.. I’d want to see if I couldn’t prepare the students for this…

There’s a subject.. I gather it’s called “collective intelligence” which is what underlies how search engines work. So I think exploring that would be a good thing.. I mean you could go so far as to be like “ok, lets build a search engine.” Perhaps not coding it or anything, but maybe sorta architecting it in terms of talking about how it would work.. particularly in the context talking about the future of search.

I also think there’s a bunch of related subjects.. One of the bigger things is just how we categorize information, from Dewy to meta data.. folksonomies.. etc.. onto semantic web stuff. You’d wanna talk about how recommendation engines work.. how Pandora works.. You’d want to talk about de.licio.us versus stumbled upon, versus what have you.. Certainly talking about twitter search in micro blogging.. like what do you get when searching conversations versus searching blogs versus searching over here..

You might even want to look at what Adobe is doing.. where when you start a video project.. you’re digitizing the video.. and its analyzing the audio and generating an xml file.. that contains the text of whatever was said in the video.. talk about how great this is for documentary film makers who might have sooo many hours of footage to go through.. when editing.. which is perhaps an application to search that we don’t normally think about.. but also that this xml, or whatever file.. stays with the video the whole way through.. and thus we enter into a world where you can search video on the net.. and search Flash content for that matter, as a result of this.. and you’ll probably be able to do this with podcasts shortly to.

There’s new stuff going on, and I don’t know how related this is to the subject of collective intelligence.. but you’ll feed text into this software… say via scanning it / ocr, or whatever.. and it will do pattern analysis.. and say “well this is where the person probably said there name” and “this is probably what this form box is.” And from here we could talk about how the government is using this to try and search for terrorists.. or how in marketing you might be looking for people who fit a certain profile as your target audience..

I think this is a conversation that naturally leads into metrics and analytics.. just how you go about finding patterns in data.. and with this you might want to talk about data visualization..

Of course you want to talk about the context of search.. like mobile search.. location search, and all that.

Maybe once you’ve covered all this sorta thing.. then start talking about.. how your dream search engine might work.

If you’re looking for information that’s not relevant to your “regular” area of interest (and therefore not relevant to your “regular” network), then plugging into a network related to your sought-after info would likely help separate the wheat from the chaff.

My 2 cents? Here goes…

There is another angle to this entire paradigm which is the evolution of services that specialize in “searching for you”.

One example for a service that is already available is the “headup” Firefox add-on which claims to use a proprietary semantic engine in order to help you “discover” online content that is relevant to you.

The evolution of a semantic web, where browsing is no longer limited to hypertext links but is an intuitive process that parallels human association, will revolutionize our Web experiences, just as the ascension of user content brought on the “Web 2.0″ revolution (I hate this buzz term so much but whatcha gonna do…)

All the best,
Mike
“I tweet @pop_art”

Here’s my addition to a possible search curriculum:

Assume that someone has looked for this information before. Think about who they are. Go find them. (In other words, sometimes it’s better to find a master than to try to be one.)