This article was taken from the May 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Love, according to a Google search, is a Wikipedia entry, a relationship calculator and a magazine. Try the same word on YossarianLives!, a "metaphorical" search engine which goes live this summer, and you get "river", "grace" and "clutch". "Love is not a river," says J Paul Neeley (above, right), cofounder of YossarianLives! "But metaphorically, there's a flash of insight -- love flows, love is ever-changing, love is difficult to control, has a source... all the attributes of a river that help us to see love in a different way."
According to Neeley, 33, traditional search gives us access to knowledge, but "tells us only what the world already knows", -- a catch-22 that led to the site's name (Yossarian is the main character in Joseph Heller's book). The site's algorithms return distant but potentially related results to offer a new perspective, so a search for "emergency room" may return a picture of an F1 pit crew.
Neeley met cofounder Daniel Foster-Smith (left) when they were studying design at the Royal College of Art. They created YossarianLives! in February 2011 with Katia Shutova (centre), a computer scientist at Cambridge University, and have since won funding from Deutsche Bank and Imperial College, along with a place at Seedcamp London.
The trio started by setting two computers to work on the British National Corpus, parsing the attributes of each word; a process which is, not surprisingly, ongoing. "The algorithms were reading Jane Austen the other day, and they started returning results from that language and time period," says Neeley. "Like a friend who keeps referencing a particular movie they like."
The intention is to present results just beyond a user's knowledge and at a distance from the original term. "Too close together, it's obvious," says Neeley. "Too far, it can appear completely random. There's a sweet spot where it gives you that flash."
This magazine is a bicycle...
Results for "Wired" on YossarianLives! include: -- Bicycle
-- Bus
-- Brain
-- Battery
-- Cup
-- Petrol
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
