Search of the future

While most “tools for thought” feel kind of trivial and inconsequential, I think that major improvements in something as fundamental as the browser could be truly transformative.

Browser of the Future

• TODO: Explore Arc Max

I think Arc, Curius, and many of the Linus Lee + Tyler Angert’s ideas can provide really helpful insights into what the future of browsers can look like.

Something key to remember: The browser of the future doesn’t necessarily have to be something designed to be low-friction and easy to use.

• Overall design and layout of Arc
  • Links automatically open in picture-in-picture
    • You can resize, drag, ctrl-f, etc within these and have multiple “pictures” open for a single link
• Many of the features from Arc Max

Super Command-F (Superf). You should be able to search across multiple pages at once, for multiple terms (this AND that), for NLP entities (people, places, things, dates), and use a human-readable regex interface (inspired by something like VerbalExpressions).

Example queries you could run:

  1. “Find all wikipedia links.”
  2. “Find all people with last names that start with A.”
  3. “Find every quote that contain a link”
  4. “Find every link in a list”
  5. “Find every sentence that contains numbers.”
  6. “Find everything related to ‘mathematics’” (using something like Word2Vec).
  7. “Open all links my research partner already saw.

https://tyler.cafe/information_forest

• Git-like version control for browsing history.

 I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version. I should be able to duplicate branches of searches, identify important pages or findings in a path, and combine / merge paths with each other.  https://tyler.cafe/information_forest

• Native note-taking/heavy integration with common note-taking applications
• Most of the features from Curius should be native to the browser. You should be able to click something on an article to save it to your “bookshelf”, and follow friends to see what they’re reading.
• Sidebar
  • Related notes that you’ve taken (using semantic search)
  • Related things from your bookshelf (using semantic search) → https://github.com/thesephist/revery
  • Other advanced search settings

Search of the Future

An RLHF-Ranker Crawler Thing