Color Changing Ice Cream: The Metaphor for Search Marketing
July 29, 2014
I read “Scientist Invents Ice Cream That Changes Colour As You Lick It.” The write up struck me as a nearly perfect metaphor for enterprise search and retrieval. First, let’s spoon the good stuff from the innovation tub:
Science might be busy working on interstellar travel and curing disease but that doesn’t mean it can’t give some time to ice cream. Specifically making it better visually.
The idea is that ice cream has an unsatisfactory user interface. (Please, do not tell that to the neighbor’s six year old.)
Spanish physicist and electronic engineer Manuel Linares has done exactly that. He’s managed to invent an ice cream that changes colour as you lick it. The secret formula is made entirely from natural ingredients…Before being served, the ice cream is a baby blue colour. The vendor serves and adds a spray of “love elixir”…Then as you lick the ice cream it will change into other colours.
My Eureka! moment took place almost instantly. As enterprise search vendors whip up ever more fantastic capabilities for key word matching and synonym expansion, basic search gets sprayed with “love elixir.” As the organization interacts with the search box, the search results are superficially changed.
The same logic that improves the user experience with ice cream has been for decades the standard method of information retrieval vendors.
But it is still ice cream, right?
Isn’t search still search with the same characteristics persistent for the last four or five decades?
Innovation defines modern life and search marketing.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2014
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