One of my biggest commercial wins was a seemingly small UI tweak that led to a roughly 2% marketplace revenue bump. Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT, think "Etsy for Teachers" -- educational resources created by and sold to other educators) was a mature marketplace, where revenue wins were typically under 0.5%. How …

One of my specialties as a freelance consultant is discovery systems for e-commerce -- web pages and backend systems for helping users search for and find what they want or need. For the last year and a half, I've been working as a consultant for DesignShop, a company that sells materials samples for home renovations. …

Say you're an Engineering Manager or a Product Manager, responsible for a business-critical search system on a website. Maybe e-commerce, maybe a marketplace, maybe something else. Search is sort of working, it doesn't crash, and it's fast, but there's a feeling that "search isn't great", and you've been …

I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I …

This is the last post in the IZE series. In the previous installment, I looked at two ways to generalize the IZE algorithm itself: preferring consistent facets and searching for trees with better goodness scores. Here I want to ask a different question: what does the AI revolution of the last few years actually change …

In previous posts, I showed off an interactive demo of the IZE algorithm, and discussed how the algorithm worked. Now, it's worth considering some ways we could generalIZE the algorithm. 🤦‍♂️ Perhaps variations on the algorithm might yield hierarchies that are even better at showcasing the contents of the texts?

As …

In the previous installment of this series, I looked at what came after IZE -- faceted search, clustering algorithms, and the various ways web search, personal information management, and e-commerce tried to solve similar problems to what IZE was attacking. None of them ended up doing what IZE did. The question I want …

In the previous post in this series, I discussed the technical details of IZE and its reception. Here I want to look at what came after — and where IZE-like ideas might still have potential.

The short version: IZE was forgotten, but the ideas it embodied — hierarchical clustering, single-word splits, dynamic navigation …

In the first post in this series, I introduced IZE -- a DOS-era personal information manager with a novel approach to search and navigation. Here I want to go deeper into how it actually worked, what its limits were, and how it was received at the time.

The algorithm

The core of IZE was patented by Paul Kleinberger …

Sometimes revisiting old technology is the best way to understand how we got where we are -- and to see what alternative paths might have looked like. This is the first in a series of posts about IZE, a DOS-era personal information manager that I think has some interesting lessons for modern search and discovery.

I'll …