In a series of blogs I will look at alternative search engines in order to rethink the standard concept of “search”. I will explore what alternative ways of using algorithms to organize knowledge there are and what we can learn from these new methods. The first alternative search engine I will look at is YossarianLives!

Discussions of the ‘society of the query’ or ‘the culture of search’ often feature the critique that search engines isolate us intellectually. Web companies do their best to tailor their search results to suit our preferences, which is why we hardly come across conflicting viewpoints or other information that can broaden our view. This problem was most famously addressed in the book The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. The logical next step is thus to wonder how we can avoid this bubble, and this is where YossarianLives! comes into view.

Introducing metaphorical search
YossarianLives! was named after the main character in Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 to highlight the ‘catch’ that comes with using search algorithms. They create a paradoxical situation since their use “both simultaneously helps us […] and hurts us”; they offer us guidance in the big jungle of existing knowledge, but this comes at the cost of the reinforcement of that same knowledge (description from the ‘about’ section of the homepage). To solve this dilemma, the makers of YossarianLives! aimed to create an engine with which to assist searchers in the search and creation of new knowledge. The result is what has now been coined a ‘metaphorical search engine’. YossarianLives! uses your query and translates it into a concept, after which it analyzes the structural components and attributes of the concept. After this it searches for concepts with similar structural attributes, to finally return a result from an entirely new domain. To illustrate the difference between regular search and metaphorical search see the difference when using the query ‘question’ in Google Images and YossarianLives!:

Unlike, say, Google Images, YossarianLives! returns results that have no immediately obvious relationship with the query. It is up to you to discover a metaphorical link between the concepts. However, if you think the results are too obvious or too vague, there is also the option to change the ‘conceptual distance’ from ‘moderate’ to ‘distant’ or ‘close’. YossarianLives! is a visual search engine and thus only shows images as results.

Loosening up thought patterns
Because of its use of metaphorical connections YossarianLives! recalls the practice of lateral thinking. This term – coined by Edward de Bono in 1967* – refers to the method of approaching problems in a creative and non-linear manner. De Bono explains that the most basic principle of lateral thinking is that “any particular way of looking at things is only one from among many other possible ways” (1967, p. 63). Instead of “moving straight ahead with the development of one particular pattern”, in lateral thinking one tries to produce as many alternative patterns as possible. An important aspect of lateral thinking is thus the search for alternatives. Whereas with “normal” search people tend to stop when they come to a promising approach, with a lateral search for alternatives “one acknowledges the promising approach and may return to it later, but one goes on generating other alternatives” (ibid.). De Bono believes that through this method people can make more thoughtful choices since they will be more aware of all the possible alternatives, and this knowledge will thus add value to the final decision. Besides that, he also thinks that lateral thinking is a great tool for getting new insights, since the method loosens up rigid patterns and thereby provokes new patterns of thought.

Challenging the filter bubble
Lateral thinking seems to provide a useful insight into how YossarianLives! challenges the dilemma of the filter bubble. Currently, most search tools focus on narrowing down our choices as much as possible to return highly relevant results only. When the results are not what we are looking for we adjust the query to something that will affirm our ‘rigid thought patterns’. We are stimulated to think vertically by digging deeper and deeper ‘in the same hole’. It is fair to assume – as De Bono does as well – that most people will stop at the very first promising result they come across and that this leads to the passive search behaviour that lies at the heart of the filter bubble. YossarianLives!, however, challenges this passive behaviour by having the searchers asses and create the relevance of the results themselves. In the example for which the query “question” was used in the metaphorical search engine (see picture) there were many results that did not seem relevant at all. Consequently, different searchers will end up with completely different interpretations and choices. If you compare this metaphorical approach to the vertical approach of Google Images, it becomes clear that a vertical search approach merely seems to reinforce ‘rigid thought patterns’.  The query “questions” unsurprisingly corresponds with question marks and “love” with countless pictures of hearts.

Imagining lateral search
So what can we learn from YossarianLives! or more generally from lateral thinking? It could well be argued that the main promise of this “alternative approach” (as opposed to the vertical approach) lies in what De Bono described as the very purpose of lateral thinking, namely “to help develop the habit of looking for alternatives instead of blindly accepting the most obvious approach” (1967, p. 64). Especially for children growing up in the ‘society of the query’ it seems essential to have some sort of tool that can stimulate them to become aware of their own search behaviour. At the same time it should be stressed that lateral thinking should not be viewed as the one and only ‘magical method’ to think creatively with. De Bono emphasizes throughout his book how it should be used as a useful tool alongside of vertical thinking. For factual queries and the exploring of a very specific concept it would of course be of little use to deliberately keep on searching for alternatives. Another problem that the makers of YossarianLives! encountered is how their metaphorical results can be hit-or-miss: “a metaphor that is astonishing and insightful to one person can be mundane to another, and meaningless to someone else” (see this blog on the ‘Stephen Fry problem’). This problem illustrates the difficulty of coming up with algorithms that successfully master the conceptual distance: results should neither be too random nor too obvious.

To summarize this blog then: if we agree that the approach towards search adopted by YossarianLives! corresponds with the lateral method of thinking as described by De Bono, we can conclude that a lateral search engine could form a useful tool to challenge the filter bubble.

*Reference: de Bono, Edward (1967). The Use of Lateral Thinking. New York: Penguin

For more alternative search engines check out the list we compiled here.