[extropy-chat] Yeah! Where the hell is Within-Text Highlighting?

[Anders Sandberg]

A B wrote:
> With that said though, wouldn't it be
> relatively easy for Google to standardize this feature such that it
> always highlights the keywords automatically, no matter what the source
> of info (website, pdf, word document, etc)? This seems like an easy
> thing to do, and it would still improve the speed and efficiency of
> collecting info - especially for those like myself.

Yes, it could be done. But I think it would be a bad thing to have as
default. In my life as an infovore there is one thing that annoys me more
than anything, and that is (usually medical journal) websites that mark
the search terms in the document as an unavoidable default. I search for a
very general concept (e.g. "memory") to set a domain and disambiguate, and
then a few particular words for the real aim of the search. But the result
is a text totally littered with distracting highlighted words. It is
especially annoying if I want to save the document for later.

Better search functions are great intelligence amplifiers. I like the
Acrobat search that shows you contexts and can search entire directory
trees. But so far nothing has beat the SGML browser I tried many years ago
that added marks to the scroll bar for the hits: not only do they show
where something is referenced, but also the distribution. I'd love to have
that feature in my web browser.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University