Idea: Search for specific things instead of by keyword
TLDR; if I search 'Biden', I want the search engine to
- give general search results as is standard for search engines
- and give a topic selector to choose WHAT I'm searching for.
The topics should include:
- People (*I.e. Essentially People would be indexed, and a 'Biden' search would give me Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, with basic overviews of who they are. Selecting 'Jill Biden' could then give additonal online resources (wiki page, official 'About' page, news maybe, idk))
- News (Journalistic articles from both mainstream and indie outlets. I'd like subtopic or subtype grouping to choose 'Mainstream News' or 'Indie News'. This could expand further into having specific topic-filtering, like 'Inflation Reduction Act' or 'Border Policies', or refining that I'm looking for news specifically about Joe Biden)
- Official Documents (Whitehouse press releases, committee investigation documents that mention "Biden")
And possibly others. The point is, I get to decide that I want to find a 'Person' or I want 'News' or I want 'Official Documents'. I don't want to search everything on the web every time I put in a keyword.
I've been thinking about this idea for 2 or 3 years, and it seems like a potential nightmare to implement, but I think it could be awesome.
Anecdote
I'm looking for an RSS app with categories AND sub-categories.
So I search 'RSS' on F-Droid & on Google Play.
I get several results on each, with a few good looking apps, but none with sub-categories.
Both stores (& especially Google Play) give lots of results that are adjacent to RSS or are rough keyword-ish matches (it seems).
I want to specifically search for things that ARE rss apps.
And then I want to search within THINGS that ARE rss apps.
If I refine my search to 'rss subcategory' (I didn't try it), I expect a mess of results that are keyword based, from all apps available.
There is some smartness in the search engines to help with this problem, but I'm not in control - the search algo is.
When I conduct a search, I want it to have an option to refine what I'm searching for to a specific subset of THINGS.
Other 'Things' I'd be interested in searching for & within include 'Official Government Documents', 'Journalistic Articles', 'Open Source Software Libraries', 'Open Source Desktop Software', 'Lawn Mower Parts', and so much more.
I hope this idea makes sense. I think I drew it up a couple years ago, so maybe I'll add images later or maybe another post to expand on the idea. I have a GUI in mind.