How do we learn of a new subject? Imagine you talk to a doctor and he tells you of a new disease you may have, say “Cystic Fibrosis”. Now if you are like most of us then you know very little of it, if anything at all.
Without going to your favorite search engine, let’s do some exercise here. What kind of questions would you ask your doctor at the point he mentions “Cystic Fibrosis” to you? Please take a couple of minutes and write them down, in the order you would ask them (please post in comments area the questions you wrote down).
For example, if the subject matter was “Lyme Disease” some questions may be:
What is Lyme Disease?
What are Lyme disease symptoms?
What are the treatments for Lyme disease?
How do I know if I have Lyme disease?
Can I Prevent Lyme Disease?
Is Lyme Disease curable?
Notice then when we learn of a new subject, we first start with basic questions. Once we acquire some knowledge, we build upon it and move to more complex questions. Why is this important? Because I don’t know if you realized or not, but others have already went through the exact same process you are going through. For example, most likely the questions you wrote for “Cystic Fibrosis” were asked many times by others who have learned about that subject before you, others who were in the same position as you were in our example (at the doctor’s office), or others who went through the learning process maybe for a school project, or maybe because they found a friend or a family member had this disease, etc, etc.
Now what if instead of coming up with basic questions, one by one, you could tap into other people’s questions (OPQ) in an instant? How would that change your view of things?
Early on in my life I used to learn of new subjects all the time (I still do of course). Instead of coming up with basic questions I asked myself “what other people have already asked about this subject?” By doing that, I would have an instant advantage on those who started from the beginning. Not only that, but I also realized allot of people had better questioning skills then I had. Tapping into their questions gave me a different perspective and an “unfair advantage” of those who did it all on their own.
So back to our example, with Assista, typing the subject “Cystic Fibrosis” will give you the following questions and more. Each question is then linked back to the page/s where the question was originally found, question highlighted, page anchored, letting you learn from the discussions of others in relation to the question.
What is the cause of cystic fibrosis? (see results sample above)
How Is Cystic Fibrosis Diagnosed?
How is Cystic Fibrosis Spread?
Why is cystic fibrosis testing recommended?
What is the meaning of cystic fibrosis?
How is osmosis involved with cystic fibrosis?
Why is the cystic fibrosis gene so frequent?
What is the basic pathophysiology of cystic fibrosis?
What are two symptoms of Cystic Fibrosis?
What Are the Signs and Symptoms of Cystic Fibrosis?
Why do some people with Cystic Fibrosis have clubbed fingers?
Do you have Cystic Fibrosis?
Does ours outrank Cystic fucking Fibrosis?
How many people have Cystic Fibrosis?
Should I be screened for cystic fibrosis?
Why does a person get cystic fibrosis?
What Makes Cystic Fibrosis a Genetic Disease?
Should I Have a Cystic Fibrosis Carrier Test?
When do cystic fibrosis symptoms begin to appear?
Is there still a gender gap in cystic fibrosis?
Is cystic fibrosis going to effect my love life?
Is there a test for the cystic fibrosis gene?
What other names do people use for Cystic Fibrosis?
Where can I find additional information about cystic fibrosis?
What type of DNA changes might cause cystic fibrosis?
Does tubefeeding help cystic fibrosis patients maintain a healthy weight?
How can Cystic Fibrosis be explored with the Biology Workbench?
Is the hemochromatosis gene a modifier locus for cystic fibrosis?
What precautions should be taken in patients with cystic fibrosis?
How does Assista compare to Yahoo Answers? First, these are totally different systems. “Yahoo Answers” is more of a Q&A type site where they only list questions from their own database while Assista aggregates content (questions) from every web page on the internet, including all of “Yahoo Answers” questions. “Yahoo Answers” is looking for the best answer for a question while Assista recognizes there may not be the best answer, or there may be many answers, many view points, or no answer at all. While Yahoo is searching for answers, Assista is searching for related discussions, or what we call a “Thoughtstream”.
On a side by side comparison, a picture is worth a thousand words:
(Yahoo Answers results on left, Assista on right)
How Assista is different then an FAQ Search? FAQ stands for “Frequently Asked Questions” while Assista is searching for all questions and in particular, highest quality questions first and discussions related to them.
Assista is a search engine, it gives you an unfair advantage on education. Instead of learning from the bottom you get an instant bird’s-eye view on a subject, topic. You also get to leverage OPQ, in particular of those who have better questioning skills then you do.
Assista is also my life project, built by Jeff Bhavnanie and our world class team for the last three years. It has hundred of millions of questions in the database and will grow to over a billion questions within the next 12-24 months. It has a discussion board on each question, a messaging system for users, rss supported, and will have a wikipedia-style answering system as well. We have a number of NLP technologies behind the scenes (a well known tech investor/banker, when saw it, said “the best NLP I’ve ever seen”), 120+ servers (before we’re even live), and it was built with scalability and performance in mind. Assista is currently in private Alpha and we hope to release it sometime before the end of year.
Improving questioning skills today will result in a better world tomorrow.
Hi,
I would love to be notified when a public alpha/beta is released…
Sounds very interesting!
10x
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Just follow the blog, I’ll post when that happens.
Cheers
Sahar
Best of lucks with this new and ambitious project Sahar! I am sure you are thinking about it already, but don’t forget to ask for user’s input in every step of their interactions with your website, and implement improvements as quickly as you can.
Only thus your idea will be bullet-proofed against quick imitators
Regards
Javier Marti
Trendirama.com
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thanks Javier
Of course we will pay close attention to user’s feedback, also plan to work with hundreds of developers, open API, and few other ideas. But first things first.. we need to go live
Are you looking for Angels?
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We may at some point but not yet. If changes I will keep you updated.
Cheers
Sahar
Sounds cool Sahar. Im excited.
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Thanks Mike,
Sahar
Very, very impressive Sahar!
It sounds like you’re definitely on the right track… I always thought it strange that companies like Google, etc. seemed to make things so complicated, and that it’d be a simple, straightforward solution like that offered by Assista that would ‘crack the code’ so to speak and make finding answers incredibly easy.
As you figured out early on (I’ve been lucky in this department too), it’s all about asking the right questions…
Great work Sahar… It’s inspiring to know a domainer who’s taking things to the next level and adding such tremendous value to the web… Keep it up!
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Thanks Colin, much appreciated
Now if you don’t mind, about that “I’ve been lucky in this department too” comment, what do you mean? Do you have a unique system you’ve created to learn better? I’m always curious of such.
Cheers
Sahar
Hi Sahar,
I just meant that I too was fortunate to realize that it was much easier to learn from those who’d already learned than to learn everything myself - and that the key to doing this was figuring out which questions to ask…
The internet is such an incredible resource because people have ‘been there, done that’ and decided to share their notes… It makes learning so much faster and easier than it was before…
I can honestly say that I haven’t had an unanswered question in the past 6 or 7 years since I discovered Google… It’s all there - very few times have I not found what I was looking for almost immediately…
You just need to know how to search - which is essentially knowing which questions to ask (as you full well know ;))… When Assista launches, it sounds like all you’ll need to know is which subject you want to learn about… This is the missing link between knowing how to rock Google and being stuck with oodles of results that aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for…
It sounds to me like your project could be a real game changer… Can’t wait to get a hold of it for some beta testing…
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“You know children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.” - John J. Plomp
cool concept. I really like the 13th question for Cystic Fibrosis
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I had to talk regarding your software. I would like to provide helping hand and assist you with socio related questions which I think would be an very hot topic for for the students to learn, as socio is about culture and so.
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Thanks. there will be time for these discussions once we put the site up. I hope before year’s end, trying to meet that deadline.
Cheers
Sahar
Absolutely brilliant. Do you realize that Assista could change everything the internet currently is? Today we write solutions for what we think others will be asking. With Assista you can write solutions we know specifically others are asking.
Assista is an affiliate marketers dream, and when Assista goes live it will spawn the most ravenous breed of affiliate marketing the internet has ever seen. Where there is money to be made there is change and evolution.
Everyone writes for the search engines based on guesses to long tail keywords. This will end the guesswork almost all together.
Tell me, will Assista be an enhancement to Google’s search results or are you thinking to develop your own search engine rankings?
In my limited thinking, I would choose the enhancement. Standing on top of those giants shoulders could give you instant credibility, much greater long term leverage, and vehicle to cash in on a lot of Adsense clicks. Kinda like what Firefox did but your idea would be much greater.
Sorry for my vision, I just looove the concept!!!
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Thanks JR for the positive comment. Assista is built on its own, currently running on 150 servers and have 20 full time employees working on it for last 3+ years. As with everything we do we will expand the project once go live into many areas, from building addons to building supporting sites and services.
Assista coems with API so we will encourage others to come up with their own ideas using our data.
I don’t think Assista is a replacement for Google or other search engines, I think they can co-exist. Assista compliments others rather then replace them. It is a complete different system and provide results a traditional search engine is not looking for. Once results are provided, again, they are presented in a different way then traditional search engines.
I don’t believe traditional engines are the solution long term, I think many systems can co-exist, and traditional engines of course will evolve as well.
Cheers
Sahar
I ahve been thinking about this for awhile and have looked at my web logs after reading this post and……
Have come to the conclusion that in using SEO and meta tags in each of our “REAL” sites we need to use a more ‘questioning’ approach to our content.
BrutChampagne.com could and should have a headline or tag asking,
“What is brut champagne?”, “Where Can I buy Brut Champagne?”, “How is Brut Champagne made?”
These added tags would certainley assist in indexing these domains and sites in the search engines (and Assista.com?) under terms I have seen used in my logs many times.
Cheers Sahar!
Chris
Organizing around questions is basically a sounder approach to search in the long term. Most philosophy of the 20th century was focused on discovering intents and assumptions behind assertions, and linking questions to actions while minimizing “answers” as a factor, treating them only as a way to get to new questions. That is, most philosophers of science now think of thought itself as a series of questions and actions with “answers” being only temporary.
From that perspective:
All actions are effectively experiments that yield new questions, some actions are *only* experiments that yield only the clues to what experiment to try next, or to when to stop experimenting. Judea Pearl approaches this technically with his “algrebra of doing” approach. Jane Jacobs explained the the problem reasonably well in layman’s terms in her last book, “Dark Age Ahead” where she decries the lack of understanding of the scientific “question chain” method in large scale decision making. She is concerned about the way answers are chained together based on axioms in theology, finance, medicine, agriculture, engineering and theorizes that a “Dark Age” comes when the combined assumptions built into many such decisions overwhelms the ability to question. As she said is happening now in North American society in particular.
Back to the search engine, finding which questions are actually related to the topic can be quite difficult. Simple keyword matching to see if the keywords are in the question, as you seem to be doing already, can be useful but I suspect in the long run you need some semantic maps to match terms like “hemochromatosis” that are extremely statistically unlikely to appear in searches on any other topic, thus effectively are queries on cystic fibrosis and should be treated as such. Same for “other names people use for cystic fibrosis”. Integrating RDF and semantic tagging behind the scenes is the standard way to approach this problem. There are some more exciting approaches too in the semantic web and tag community.
Sahar, would be nice to hear updates on assista… for example, why you eliminated the logo. also would love to know what your favorite quotes about questions are. Sayings like ‘”If a man will begin in certainties he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin in doubts he shall end in certainties.” - I’m sure you have collected a few.
– Eric
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Not much updates here, the project is on hold until the end of the year. We have too many projects spinning and had to choose which is more important. Not easy to do, but essential.
Cheers
Sahar