23Aug13 | The Three Search Problems

Last Wednesday I was drowning in lots of work.

Around midday there was a meeting with many many action items discussed. I was keeping paper notes for when the meeting is over! The longer the meeting lasted the longer I was worried about skipping any of the discussed items because it was core to a project deadline.

As soon as I left the meeting, this prompt popped on the corner of my screen:

In 5 seconds, I had a full summary of the meeting with a breakdown of todo items each of us should do to move forward.

I just felt relief! Because now I won’t have to go through the dread of doing it manually on a very busy day.

I have been using Rewind.ai for some time, but they just launched a new feature that accurately and magically summarizes meetings in seconds.

From a 10-thousand ft. view, many SaaS startups are trying to solve one of the three search problems:

1. Search anything you’ve known

This is the category of Knowledge Management apps – Be it personal or organizational.

Note-taking apps like Roam, Obsidian, Craft, & many more are helping individuals build & organize their knowledge through simple & effective tools.

Workspace apps like Notion & Coda are helping people at organizations to structure their business/product/technical knowledge in one environment shared between all team members.

2. Search anything you’ve seen

This is the example I mentioned above – Apps like Rewind & MyMind are used to search anything you have seen on screen, read, saved, or even listened to on your computer.

This category of apps differ from the first one in 2 main points:

1. Their heavier use of AI
2. An item you have seen is not necessarily an item you have “known”
3. Search anything you’ve done

This category of apps is used to be known among niche groups – They could be athletes who want to look at their health data, programmers who want to look at their daily screen time, or mental health enthusiasts who keep diligent diaries of their days.

To day, there hasn’t been a Search platform for your life activities that is as performant as those of the other 2 categories.

This is true despite the data being already there:

1. Health data activity is already available through our wearables
2. Location data activity is already available on our phones
3. Online activity is already available through screen time services
4. Events activity is already available on our calendars
5. Diaries of our days, experiences, & progress are already available through journal apps

Not only that, the overlap between the 3rd category and each of the other two is considerably non-existent as opposed to the intersection between category 1 & 2:

That’s exactly all the more reason for why this search problem is so urgent – We have to have a method to quantify and visualize our experiences after we live them. There’s a wide range of reasons why we might want not to forget anything about our life activity, and that’s the core principle behind why we’re building Hyperspaces.

Waiting list for Hyperspaces is now live on:

hyperspaces.live

Your Automated Journal & Self-tracking Lab

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