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Navigate, don't search | thesephist.com

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Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map. All information tools have to give users some way to find the information they’re looking for. For Google Search, it’s mainly the search bar. For a notes app, it may also be a search bar, but may also include things like links between notes, nested hierarchy of folders, or something like a “recently edited” page. For social media sites or other online services, the best way to find information may actually be some algorithmic recommendation system or a social feed. All of these things, from text search boxes to links to algorithmic feeds, occupy places on a single spectrum, the spectrum of “interfaces people use to find information”. On one side are interfaces that teleport the user strai

Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map. All information tools have to give users some way to find the information they're looking for. For Google Search, it's mainly the search bar. For a notes app, it may also be a search bar, but may also include things like links between notes, nested hierarchy of folders, or something like a "recen

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