Frustrated with search

Today I am very frustrated that I cannot find what I am looking for.

I remember reading an article the other day about the declining number of people who use web based e-mail. It included a really interesting chart to demonstrate the relative decline of the various options (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). I wanted to refer to this chart in another post I want to write today, but I can’t find the article.

I would normally have tagged it in del.icio.us if I thought I was going to refer to it again, but I haven’t.

I flag a lot of things that I might go back to in feedburner too, but I haven’t.

So it’s off to Google, Live Search, and the rest, but they aren’t telling me what I want to know. They want to point me to sites that discuss the relative merits of each one, but that’s not what I want. I want a chart that I know I’ve seen, but can’t communicate through the interface available to me what it is I require. I can’t communicate the concept or my impression of what I remember. I’m stuck trying to find the combination of words that get me to an answer.

I’m also left with the feeling of inadequacy that comes when I know I should have done something (del.icio.us) but didn’t.

Search still has a long way to go. If these systems know so much about me, why don’t they remember something that I found interesting? Why do I need to tell them that I found it interesting? Why can’t I see all of the pages that I actually bothered to read in the last few weeks? There won’t be that many of them. Most of the data I trawl through is only scan read, very little is read in detail.

Time to go and think about something else, it may come back to me then. The brain does something that none of these IT systems do yet, it carries on processing something even when I’m not thinking about it. But then I might be worried about the privacy issues.