A Smarter Search Engine: Encouraging curiosity, creativity, and criticality about knowledge
A smarter search engine doesn’t just answer the question you ask, it helps you to ask better questions … But what is a ‘better question’?
It’s the question you ask once you know more about how knowledge works – and what the AI is doing when it constructs an answer.
Our ‘smarter’ search engine asks you to choose the disciplinary lenses you want to use when you search for knowledge.
Click on the image here and close the window to return to this page.
So why?
The idea is to think about the ‘world of content’ online that the bot is accessing. When you write your search – how can you direct the bot to the knowledge you want?
The traditional way to organise knowledge is into disciplines – and that is worth knowing today. The way we test and evaluate maths for accuracy is different to how we test history.
Quick Tip
There’s a lot of content on the web and it’s not all true or fact-checked. Try including some precise and ‘scholarly’ words in your prompt to point the AI to higher quality, more accurate content.
Mental Maps
The tools we all use to access knowledge change our mental maps of what knowledge looks like. Some of us grew up with a library nearby – how does searching in a library change how you think about knowledge, compared with searching the web.
We want our children to grow up with good mental maps and a sense of ‘agency’ (choice) over where they look and how they filter what’s available.
Our prototype EI Search uses saved answers generated by an AI – to encourage you to become more curious about how different disciplines answer the same question.
