Thursday, October 28, 2010

Word group theory (3) . The existence of unnamed things and their illustrations.

The other day, the sales termination of the cassette type walkman which has been produced since 1979 was announced. If I have to take up one remembrance about cassette type walkman, troubles around the tape tangling come up first. And its memory comes with the scene of putting a pencil into the hole of cassette and rotating the cassette around the pencil to reel the extracted tape line.

When I reminisced about such a reeling action this time, I noticed that the action would soon be forgotten by our history soon or later with the extinction of audio cassette tapes. To confirm today's situation, I did Google-search about it in Japanese and noticed that the action seems to have never been named at least in Japanese.
If unnamed, the future generation can't know it's existence. We should not expect the future people to input words in a row like 'cassette tape, pencil, rotate, reel' as I put into search dialog box in Japanese.

After thinking about this matter, I generalized it as follows and it led me to a conclusion that a simple illustration would help search engine to improve usability for searching unnamed things.

Conclusion 1. Search-target objects can be classified into two states. A)Named things. B) Unnamed things.

Conclusion 2. For unnamed objects, the search engine had better give an engine-internal name provisionally to each unnamed object. However, their internal names should not appear on customer'
s search screen.

Conclusion 3. If the combination of 'cassette tape, pencil, rotate' is input by any customer, an illustration depicting a cassette tape rotating around pencil should appear on the search screen with the message 'Do you want to know about this action?"
















Simple illustration might help us to find unnamed things smoothly.