Search Patterns

Chapter 2. The Anatomy of Search

"How can a part know the whole?"

—Blaise Pascal

In anatomy, we divide to understand. We dissect the whole to study its parts. We identify internal organs and map their relationships. As a major branch of biology, anatomy reflects both the power and the limits of specialization. For we must not allow our focus on form and structure to distract us from function or blind us to context. Anatomy can’t tell us how the mind works. It can’t reveal the sublime experience of vision. And it certainly can’t predict the behavior of an ant colony or a stock market. These complex adaptive systems exhibit macroscopic properties of self-organization and emergence. Not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but it’s also different. It’s a territory off the map. And yet, our simple models have value, for they offer us a very good place to start.

Our map to search features five elements: users, creators, content, engine, and interface. Like any map, it hides more than it shows. It’s deceptive by design. It shifts attention from software and hardware to the elements of user experience. Our plan is to study each element without losing sight of the whole. We must know enough about the technology to understand what’s difficult and what’s possible. But we need not become intimately familiar with load balancing, pattern matching, and latent semantic indexing. That’s why we have specialists. Instead, we’ll study the components and context in sufficient detail to ...