A short guide to finding the thing you half remember

A short guide to finding the thing you half remember

There is a category of frustration that has nothing to do with the internet being slow or the search being bad. You are looking for something specific, you know it exists, and you cannot remember what it was called.

The search engine cannot help you, because the problem is that your query is a description and not a name.

Descriptions are harder to search than names

Saying what you want is easy. "Something that shows characters next to each other" is a description. "Character comparison" is a name, and only one of the two finds anything.

The same thing happens with a recipe. "Whatever you mix with three herbs to make the thing that heals" does not match a page titled with the name of that item.

A reference that is indexed by the thing itself, rather than by a description of the thing, closes that gap.

Two shapes of reference

There are two useful shapes, and they answer different questions.

One is the relationship view. When you need to place a character you cannot remember, knowing who they stand next to is more useful than knowing their page. FandomGraph draws that, per series, at https://fandomgraph.com.

The other is the ingredient view. When you are mid-game and you have the item in your hand, the entry point should be the item, not the chapter. HowToCraft indexes it that way, per game, at https://howtocraft.net.

The question worth asking

When you build anything that people will look things up in, there is one question that decides whether it works.

Not "how do I make it easy to browse". Browsing is what you do when you already know what you are looking for.

The question is: "if I only remember what it is like and not what it is called, can I still find it?"

If the answer is no, the reference works for you and for nobody who has not memorised your naming scheme, which is nobody who arrived from outside.

That is why the ingredient view and the relationship view exist. They are the two cases where a description is the only thing the visitor has.