Stewart Butterfield Quotes

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.

In the early days, I really felt the pain of not being able to find information easily. I guess that helped me to develop an urge to write things like a search engine.

I thought of the idea of Summly in March or April 2011. I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me. When you type into Google an esoteric term, you get quite a lot of stuff that's not relevant.

That is really not much different from the search engines that are being constructed today for users throughout the entire world to allow them to search through databases to access the information that they require.

Search as a paradigm will continue to be probably even increasingly important because the information that's out there is only going to grow exponentially - and the only way to sort through all that is by some form of search.

Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people to find, use and share critical business information quickly.

Google is all about information. So the notion of using and presenting information in the right point at the right time to users is what, in essence, describes Google.

The birth of the search engine, it's nothing new: it's essentially embedded in our literature; it's how ideas relate, how the mind makes connections. I mean, connections are made online through links, and within an algorithm, they're made through degrees of relevancy between different terms.

Inside all the computers of any large corporation is every decision that gets made. But people spend a huge amount of time trying to find the correct piece of information.

If we want to take a bunch of phrases and run them through a Google and say 'Hey, who else has said them,' I can come up with the list in five minutes.

Scientists need the infrastructure for scientific search to aid their research, and they need it to offer relevancy and ways to separate the wheat from the chaff - the useful from the noise - via AI-enabled algorithms. With AI, such an infrastructure would be able to identify the exact study a scientist needs from the tens of thousands on a topic.

Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

There's the wonder of being able to do research from your own living room, of course. I do find that my biggest research issue, though, is how to frame my questions.

We want Google to be the third half of your brain.

The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that.

When I find the right information, the Web is a blessing; when I don't, it's a distraction.

Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.

Search is essential to every service that Yahoo offers.

You know, when people want to get any information, research information, it will all exist on these Web sites.

There's nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.

It turns out a human being in two, three or four hours can build a search result that's much better than Google, Yahoo or Ask.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

Search is now more than a web destination and a few words plugged into a box. Search is a mode, a method of interaction with the physical and virtual worlds. What is Siri but search? What are apps like Yelp or Foursquare, but structured search machines? Search has become embedded into everything and has reached well beyond its web-based roots.