For decades, the search bar has been our digital oracle. We type in keywords—fragments of a question—and in return, we receive a list of potential paths, a library of links we must then sift through ourselves. We search for information. But what if the goal was never information, but a solution? An answer? Advice?
It’s a thought I’ve been wrestling with for a long time. In fact, seeing the rise of conversational AI and sophisticated digital assistants today feels like watching a memory unfold. The core idea I want to convey is this — I had brought up this exact shift over a decade ago. In a 2010 blog post titled TIME TRAVEL ?, I predicted that within 25 years, no one would search for "INFORMATION" on platforms like Google. Instead, they would state their "problem" to a device and receive a readymade "solution / answer / advice" in milliseconds. It’s striking to see how that future is no longer a distant projection but our current reality.
My fascination with this concept of proactive, intelligent information retrieval goes back even further. I remember an email I sent to my team—Nirmit, Mitchelle, Aparna, Archana, Gokul, and Reena—back in 2004 about a piece of software called Blinkx. It was based on the idea of an "implicit query," where the software would understand what you were working on and proactively find related files and web pages without being asked. It was a nascent glimpse into a future beyond the reactive search bar, as I noted in Software Searches Without Being Asked.
Over the years, I explored this from different angles, from practical strategies like the "Long Tail" concept for job portals, which I discussed with my colleague Shalaka (Long Tail - Jobs), to more ambitious projects.
Today, this long-held vision is the driving force behind my digital avatar at hemenparekh.ai. The entire project is an experiment in transitioning from a repository of information—my 30,000+ documents—to a source of solutions. The goal is for you to ask a question and receive a direct answer synthesized from my life's work, not just a link to a blog post.
This journey hasn't been without its technical hurdles. In my dialogues with Suman (suman.kanuganti@personal.ai) and Sharon of Personal.ai, the platform powering my avatar, we’ve explored various ways to make the AI truly conversational. For a time, the AI was generating key questions from my documents, but when that feature was paused, we had to innovate. As I detailed in a note about modifying my AI's interface, we discovered we could use BARD to generate thousands of relevant questions from my blogs, creating a local database to guide users toward meaningful interactions.
Now, I'm even thinking about the next step: a kind of reverse-engineering of my own knowledge base. I recently discussed with my colleague Kishan the idea of a system that doesn't just wait for a query, but actively analyzes my writings to identify themes I've covered extensively and those I've barely touched (Reverse Engineering of Blogging). This would be the ultimate form of proactive intelligence.
The era of simply 'searching' is ending. We are moving from a paradigm of finding documents to one of finding answers. The future I wrote about in 2010 is here, and I am building it one memory block at a time.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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