That Guy With The Thing From That Movie

Last weekend I was at dinner with friends who are just starting to embrace the world-at-your-fingertips convenience of smart phones.

They’re considering a poodle-cross and were wondering which breeds would be best.

Now we’re all familiar with the modern dinner-party phenomenon where someone’s desire to wonder and conjecture, to wistfully speculate, is brought to an abrupt halt by having a wikipedia entry jammed in their face.

I was that face-jammer.

Wonder no more, said I, with an unnecessary flourish of my phone that nearly sent flying the very fine French red I was drinking. I quickly googled ‘best breed to cross with poodle’ and handed over a top-10 list complete with pics. It was exactly what they wanted.

How did you find that? Rodney marvelled. I smiled secretively, letting him think I was in possession of some arcane dog-breeding knowledge, and not simply an overfamiliarity with Buzzfeed’s style of picture-driven curation.

In truth though, just as RainMan was an excellent driver, I am an excellent googler. Like seriously top-notch. In fact I would say that, together with dishwasher-stacking and 80s-lyrics-lip-syncing, googling makes up my triumvirate of amazing yet sadly unmonetisable talents.

Where others fail, I triumph. If it’s out there lurking in cyberspace, I will track it down and bring it to you like a cat with a dead bird. But less gross. Though depending on what you’re into, maybe not.

But my ability to find what I don’t know — call it a super-talent if you will — is limited by the information I do know.

The other night Craig and I were watching Daredevil and there was an actress who kept reminding me of an actor whom I just couldn’t place.

Me: Who does that girl remind me of?

Craig: I have no idea.

Me: Yes you know him. He was that guy that was mean in that movie.

Craig: Oh you mean Alan Rickman.

Me: Yes! Thank you!

Luckily in this case my excellent and detailed hints were sufficient that Craig’s answer was obvious.

But what if your informational crumbs are not enough to form a proper cyber-trail? This is where Google lets us down. This is where the internet as a whole has a fatal flaw*.

What we need is what I think of as personal-psycho-search — part personal history, part web-searching, part mind-reading.

You would be able to search stuff like:

• Where did I find that cronut that was really awesome that time?
• What do you call that thing with the whatsit on it?
• (And my particular favorite) How do I get home from here if I don’t recognise any landmarks and I can’t read maps?

I think you can see the opportunity that lies waiting for some savvy developer.

Even more sophisticated would be the kind of search that mimics my sister’s ability to not only fill in the blanks I don’t know, but correct the bits I have wrong, such as in this actual conversation we had one time.

Me: Hey what was that show we watched as kids that had that guy George in it, and it was called something and something?

Jackie: It was called 1915 and his name was Scott.

Me: That’s the one!

We need an app that can do that.

* It is not a flaw. It is possibly not even fatal.

Originally published at micheleconnolly.com on June 29, 2015.