Killa App

What if you could turn any webpage into a search engine?

Now you can! Thanks to Ambiently, a startup company that is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Its purpose is to create web discovery engine applications. Ambiently is the first ever "discovery engine." It differs from search engines like Google and Yahoo in that it is not a website that you visit and type in a search term. Rather, it is a bookmarklet that exists on your browser, which you can click while you are visiting any website and yield a list of relevant sites.

Envisioning the broad usage and benefits of creating a page-centric "ambient web" for every page on the web, Ambiently aims to create a new, richer web browsing and search experience for all web users.

Ambiently works with search engines to create a richer web browsing experience. The Ambiently blog refers to information-seeking on the web as a journey. Google provides a good starting point for finding one or two great sources of information, but Ambiently carries the web user along the rest of the journey.

To better understand the importance of a discovery engine, we can look at information-seeking using the famous berry-picking analogy by Marcia Bates (1989). She proposed that browsing the internet is a lot like picking berries in a field:

Envisioning the broad usage and benefits of creating a page-centric "ambient web" for every page on the web, Ambiently aims to create a new, richer web browsing and search experience for all web users.

When you have found find a big ripe berry on a vine, you know you have found a good patch and you stay there to find more ripe berries. A discovery engine works in the same way. It pulls up other websites within the same neighborhood as the one you have found.

To use this tool, you must first go to the Ambiently home page and drag the Ambient Page toggle button up to your toolbar (it works for pretty much every web browser). The button will be there every time you open your browser. Then, click the Ambient Page button from any website and Ambiently will create a search based on keywords within that site to provide the most relevant results.

Since Ambiently is so new, it is hard to say who's using it and how successful it is. So far the reviews are mostly positive. People like the fact that it is different from a normal search engine and find that it is a useful tool to use in addition to Google. Some use Ambiently for specific kinds of searches, like Samuel Dean who uses it for

finding good alternative content on esoteric topics and seeing how my content is being used by others.

Other users agree that Ambiently is more useful than a search engine for specific and unique topics. Scientist Seth Greenblatt finds it useful for research:

It is not always clear what search term would provide me with the most fruitful direction to go. Instead of trying a large number of search terms looking for the best one, I just have to go to a page that looks interesting, and let Ambiently do a more general search, and I can see a number of results, hopefully finding one or two that look worthwhile.

And Mr. Byrne appreciates its contribution to education:

Do you remember the old days of doing academic research? You know, back when to find content related to what you were reading you looked in the book’s bibliography. Ambiently takes that concept and applies it to web research.

While Ambiently can never replace a search engine, its usefulness for specific types of searches and in the fields of research and academics indicate a good chance that it will stick around for a long time to come. As long as Google does not develop its own discovery engine, which is possible considering all the things you can do on Google these days, Ambiently and Google shouldn't be in competition. Ambiently is different from Google, and both are useful for browsing in different ways. Google is great for finding initial sources, and Ambiently helps you find related sources. It is especially helpful for specific topics when you are having a hard time coming up with the right search query in Google.

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Now that I have filled you in on everything you wanted to know about Ambiently, it is time to show you why you need Ambiently in your life.

Research is a fact of life for psychologists and students of psychology.  We consult past and current research to stay up to date, and researchers use it to inform their own studies.  When browsing the internet for research studies or other sources of information, we either start out with a very specific topic, or we refine our initial broad query using search engine results.

For example, when I was choosing a topic for my Writing paper, I began by searching for research showing that meditation produces promotes psychological wellbeing, therefore helping people with emotional problems and psychological disorders.  My Google searches led me to some studies that described mindfulness and tested its efficacy for treating depression.  I was intrigued, for here was an example of meditation being used in clinical psychology.

Once I had narrowed my topic down to mindfulness-based interventions, I returned to Google to search for information on mindfulness and empirical studies.  If I had known about Ambiently back then, I would have continued searching using it instead.  With Ambiently, I could have turned the first article I found on mindfulness into its own search engine to find relevant websites.  Since that article was very useful and pertained to my specific topic, then a search based on the key terms within that article would provide optimal results, which I could have obtained through Google only if I had devised the perfect query.

Search engines are great for getting started, especially if you don't yet have a clear idea of what you want to research.  But Ambiently can help us Psychologist folk out by creating our searches for us once we have found a specific topic and a pertinent website.  And to my readers who aren't psychologists but just want to research meditation from different perspectives, this tool is for you too!  As long as you find a site specific to your interest, Ambiently will provide additional relevant sources.

Let's return to the example of my research paper on mindfulness training in therapy.  Pretend I had known about Ambiently, and I happened upon an intriguing source, such as Mindfulness and Acceptance (a book by Hayes et al which I actually used in my paper).  Instead of putting myself through the trouble of coming up with search terms in Google to find similar sources, I simply click the Ambiently Page button on my toolbar and, voila!, I yield a list of websites based on the subject matter of the book, including links to books on Amazon about using mindfulness to treat anxiety and behavioral problems in children, as well as books on specific mindfulness-based intervention such as ACT and Behavioral therapies and Psychotherapy and MBSR,  a self help guide that teaches mindfulness, various sources on mindfulness and acceptance, and lots of other sources that are related yet provide some unique insight or perspective.

Now, I don't want to oversell this tool.  When using it, I do find some good resources, but I inevitably go back to Google, either to find a new article to ambiently (If 'google' can be used as a verb, then so can 'ambiently'), or to modify the types of sources I yield.  With Ambiently, there is no "advanced search" tool (although, I suppose, it is in itself a kind of advanced search engine, since it produces the optimal search for you) and no Ambiently Scholar or Ambiently Blogs like there are on Google.  When I used Ambiently in the example above, I started from an online book, and the large majority of my results were also books, so I basically only got the same kinds of sources (books) and did not have the option to search for other kinds (articles, blogs, etc.).  It is my prediction that Ambiently, which is brand new and its in its Beta form (meaning that it is changing), will allow for more personalized searches.  Instead of just having a toggle button on the toolbar, there will be an Ambiently button with a drop-down menu (like Diigo), where you can view and edit the search terms which Ambiently has chosen and specify which kinds of sources you want to search within (peer-reviewed articles, blogs, newspapers, books, etc.).  If Ambiently does not make these changes, then Google will just make its own bookmarklet that includes these functions.

Despite its limitations, Ambiently really is a wonderful tool. It's very easy to use - just drag, drop, and click! As a 'web discovery engine,' it supplements regular search engines, formulating a specialized search for you when you're unable to come up with the right search terms yourself, which can be a major challenge in research.  It's great for fields that involve lots of research, like Psychology, and for anyone searching unique and specific topics.  I'm sure in the days (or months or years) to come, filters and advanced options will be added to and enhance the bookmarklet, lest Google develop its own superior discovery engine to supersede it.

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This post is intended to provide context for my PowerPoint presentation on Ambiently:

Ambiently Powerpoint

View more presentations from kmnorris.

Ambiently is a startup company developing web discovery applications, headquartered in Houston, Texas.  The Ambiently tool, developed this year, is a web discovery engine which means that it provides you with relevant web links directly from the site you are viewing.

As you can see in the PowerPoint, all you have to do is drag the toggle button from the homepage into your toolbar. Just click this button from any site to find relevant websites.

This is different from search engines because you do not have to come up with a query.  Ambiently creates a search for you.  It can be compared to Stumble Upon, which directs you to websites based on your interests.  But the websites that Stumble Upon directs you to are based on recommendations by like-minded people (people who rated favorably the same sites as you), whereas Ambiently's results are based on one specific site that you select.  Stumble Upon is helpful for finding various websites of general interest, but is not as useful as Ambiently for doing research, nor does it provide results as specific as those you get from Ambiently.

My presentation includes an example of Ambiently in action, using my blog as a starting point to find other sources that discuss the same topic.  Clicking on Ambiently Page takes me to a new page.  The top of the page names the site I started from, and underneath it is a list of links to relevant websites, each with a blurb describing its subject matter.  As you can see in my screen shots, I get a lot of very specific results on the same topic as my blog.  "The Mind-Body Connection" caught my attention, so I clicked on it and was taken straight to an article that I found very interesting.

Now, when I do a Google search using the key terms from my blog (mind body physical effects meditation), I get varied results, as you can see in my presentation.  But I to do a search that is more geared toward my specific topic.  So I find one website in the Google results that fits my area of interest, "Meditation as Medicine," and press the Ambiently Page button from there to get really good and really specific results.

So far, Ambiently users have given positive reviews, but there are some drawbacks to this tool.  There are no filters, so you cannot specify the types of sources you want to search for (scholarly articles, books, etc.), and it isn't possible to edit the search terms.  Since the search uses lots of keywords from the site you are viewing, it ends up providing a lot of links to the same article posted on other websites.  This tool is only useful if you know exactly what you are searching for and need specific results.  For general searches or beginning of research, a search engine is much more useful.  Ambiently is a useful tool despite these limitations, and if Google becomes aware of this tool, it may create its own superior discovery engine to supersede it.

On a search engine, you need to think of a good query and type it into a search box. With Ambiently, all you need to do is to click a button, which leads to a list of web links related to the current webpage. In other words, every webpage now is an automated "search engine" for a special topic.  This is especially useful for research on specific topics and can benefit people in research-oriented fields, such as Psychology.