First off, why bother? Is it necessary to organize your files in hierarchies as has been done in the past 37 years(since 1980 or approximately the advent of the personal computer)? Some would say, “of course it is, how are you going to make sense of all the data strewn about randomly”. Up until the last couple of years I would have said that too. Nothing can replace a good ole hierarchy, and if it goes 20 levels deep, that doesn’t matter because you only need to view the top parts to have a starting point.
This is before SEO(search engine optimization). I am not so interested in SEO as it is used in ecommerce parlance where you do your durnedest to bring your site or a page to the top of a search engine. I am interested in PSEO or Personal Search Engine Optimization, borrowing the term from “Personal Computers”.
Many people already know that Google has advanced search algorithms for images. That goes for searches for images that contain text as well as using an image itself to search for other images or text that the initial search image may refer to. In order to see searches on images that contain text, it is easiest to find examples inside Google Drive with Google Photos connected to Google Drive. Microsoft has its own system underway that accomplishes the same thing using the OneDrive. Here are a couple of examples…
Microsoft gives you the opportunity to edit the text that it extracted from the image in order to make the improvement of search incremental. Pretty handy. Google doesn’t give you this but they do allow for you to search based on object type and not text, as in the first example above.
Anyway, in future posts I intend to explore why it may not be so necessary to organize files hierarchically if Personal Search Engine Optimization parameters are considered. I can envision AI training as taking over in importance rather than clarity of organization. Not because clarity of organization is useless but because the amount of data that people will be wanting to store will preclude organization of it in a conventional sense. Continually developing personal AIs will need to be “unleashed” in order to help people deal with the volume.
