Search Engines

Search engines generally do not think the way humans think when humans are looking for additional information. Search engines use key words and not associations of search term words with other words. You are more like the Semantic Web in that you can instantly make associations in your mind by any set of associations that present themselves: different people you know, places you know about, people and places, etc. In technical research you can fix in your memory observed situations and observed outcomes. You can relate what you are doing to what other people have published about the same research topic. I call this process associative inference. It allows us to think about any combination of things we have in memory compared to new information flowing into our memory. Continuing our earlier analogy, if you never had a dog, and it didn’t have fleas, or thought about this relationship much, your associative retrieval of dog and fleas would be weak or even forgetful. But if you have a dog and it has been plagued by flea problems, the association between dog and fleas in your mind would be very high.