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.

The future of meditation in the medical domain

This blog has emphasized the psychological benefits of meditation.  Diaphragmatic breathing, letting go of thoughts and focusing on one's body is very calming.  It helps people with anxiety disorders relax and replaces rumination on and avoidance of negative thoughts in people with depression, consequently minimizing the impact of distressing thoughts and preventing depressive episodes.

My research on mindfulness-based interventions shows that meditation can be incorporated in a clinical setting.  It really does help people who have psychiatric disorders deal with their problems.

Mindfulness-based interventions have been around for only the past two-ish decades, and already the literature on the topic is huge.  I would not be surprised if, within my lifetime, every therapist utilized mindfulness training.  I'm sure mindfulness training will soon become part of the curriculuum for all degree programs in clinical psychology.  Already, many therapists teach their patients breathing techniques to use when they become distressed or anxious.  The next step is to add the other aspects of meditation to this training.  I feel that therapists will embrace mindfulness because of its lasting usefulness.  Cognitive therapy or behavior therapy may work immediately, but relapses are common, especially for depression.  If therapists simply incorporate mindfulness training to the usual intervention, then they are imparting a skill onto their patients that the patient can use throughout their life to prevent relapse, so that they will never have to go back to therapy.  This is much safer and cheaper than medication, and it gives engenders an invaluable sense of strength and confidence by empowering the person to effect his or her own wellbeing instead of relying on a professional or chemicals.  This is extremely important especially for people who suffer from depression, who often feel helpless and out of control.

The positive psychological effects of meditation indirectly produces physical benefits.  The mind is connected to the immune system.  Being stressed or sad is associated with weakened immunity and poor health, while optimism and psychological wellbeing is associated with physical wellbeing and longer life.  As meditation has begun to permeate the psychological field, it may also become more prominent in general medicine.  Meditation can be used as preventitive medicine because of its positive effects on the immune system, and because it lowers blood pressure, thus obviating the risk of coronary heart disease and other related disorders.  It can also help people with HIV and other immune deficiency disorders to prevent infection, and for people with chronic pain and terminal illness to boost their mood, prolong lifespan, and reduce pain.  The increased use meditation for these conditions will lead to further research on the usefulness of meditation in the medical domain, which may show it to be applicable for the treatment or prevention of other disorders.

Meditation has recieved a lot of attention recently in the psychological and medical fields.  I think it will have a large positive impact on these fields in the future.  Soon, meditation will no longer be viewed as alternative medicine, but as a normal component of healthcare.

Comment on an interview with Dr. Goldstein

 Dr. Elisha Goldstein is a clinical psychologist who practices mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) in West LA.  He's also a professional mental health blogger writer for mentalhealth.net and psychcentral.com and author of audio CDs.

Therese J. Borchard interviewed Dr. Goldstein and put it in her blog in a post called Mindfulness and Psychotherapy: An Interview with Dr. Elisha Goldstein.

The interview answered some questions that I didn't think to ask in my research on mindfulness.

First, she asks if there are times when mindfulness is not the right approach to use and whether it can actually make things worse.  I had thought about this in regards to depression.  People with depression often maintain and increase the depression by ruminating.  They analyze the events that make them sad, thinking about causes and consequences and so on.  Mindfulness is a more adaptive approach than rumination, but it seems that sitting in silence and allowing thoughts to happen may lead to rumination.  In this case, it would seem like a better idea to do something enjoyable and distract yourself from your thoughts.

Dr. Goldstein's answer is that mindfulness is a very effective technique to keep yourself in the present and to recognize when we are judging ourselves so we can learn to accept our thoughts. However, when a person is feeling extremely depressed, it is very difficult to be mindful. In this case,

distraction is a good way to go, just be intentional about it. The truth is, if you’re being intentional with the distraction, in a way, you are present.

 Mindfulness is more effective to prevent future episodes of depression.

The whole interview is really interesting. You should definitely read it if you want to learn about accepting yourself, dealing with depression, or mindfulness.

Yoga postures

I am going to share with you guys some of my favorite yoga postures and the special benefits of each. I got the info from Santosha, where you can find other postures as well if you're interested.

First is Akarna dhanur-asana (shooting bow posture).



1. Sit on the floor, legs together straight in front of you. Place hands on top of the thighs. Inhale deeply.

2. Exhale. Grab right foot with right hand and left foot with the left hand.

3. Inhale. Pull the right foot back, next to right ear. Hold for duration of inhale.

4. Exhale. Return to first position. Repeat on other side.

While you do hold the shooting bow pose, you are supposed to focus your gaze on a "target," as if you are an archer, and hold steady. This technique helps you develop focused attention.

Another favorite is Anjanaya-asana (salutation posture)


1. Kneel

2. Extend your left foot forward, knee bent

3. Palms together in front of your chest

4. With palms together, raise the arms above your head and look up.

5. Bend backward stretching the arms backward and straightening out the right leg. Hold for as long as comfortable.

6. Return to first position and repeat on other side.

This posture benefits the hips, back, chest, arms, and legs. It also improves concentration and balance.

Now, my very favorite: Chakra-asana (Wheel pose)


1. Lie flat on your back.

2. Exhale and bend the knees so that your feet are as close to the butt as possible but still flat on the floor.

3. Bend your arms and place palms of the hands flat on the floor beneath the shoulders

4. Inhale and raise head, back, and butt, arching the back.

5. Hold for duration of inhale. Exhale. Lie back down and return to initial pose.

This challenging posture has lots of physical benefits. It strengthens the spine, shoulders, arms and legs. It makes the spine more flexible. It also stimulates the cardiovascular system. The more you practice and perfect the posture, the more benefits you will gain from it.

I also started looking into Savasana.

This is not merely lying down and letting your mind wander. It involves focused attention on the body. This simple pose provides rejuvenation and relief from stress. It is effective for insomnia and anxiety. It is a great way to regain inspiration or just take a break after a stressful day or strenuous activity.

So there you go! Some fun postures that are good for the body and mind!

Ambiently reviews

Ambiently is a VERY new tool. Like, it just came out this year. So there really aren't a whole lot of reviews and such out there.  And I have not been able to find anything that indicates how many people are using the site.  But I did find a lot of articles and blogs on Google that at least mention the tool, which is impressive for such a new tool.  So that at least shows that people are aware of it and are talking about it, which probably means a considerable number of people are currently using it already.

On web worker daily, Samuel Dean posts his thoughts on ambiently, which he recently started using.  As a web worker, he explores search engines besides Google to get different kinds of results. He has found ambiently to be useful, especially for topics intended for a small or specific audience:

I find it most useful for quickly showing me alternatives to pages on fairly esoteric topics, and particularly useful for quickly looking at how anything I’ve written on the web is being picked up by others.

He gives, as an example, a link to an article that he had written about a Firefox extension called Pencil that he thought was useful.  When he goes to that page and clicks on the Ambiently tab, he finds web pages that mention his article and other sites that discuss Pencil.

He prefers Ambiently to Google for these kinds of searches because

Ambiently appears to look at a whole lot of keywords on any web page you’re on and then seeks to find matches for groups of them.

He concludes by saying

I’ll give Ambiently a nod for indeed being different from a search engine — definitely more of a “discovery engine” — but it’s primarily best at finding non-obvious relationships related to offbeat topics.

Killer Startups, which reviews internet startups, has this to say about Ambiently: 

The main advantage that this site has over search engines is that it is much simpler – you don’t have to dream up a query to fire up the search, you simply click on the Ambiently button to come across related links. As it is correctly pointed out online, each and every page becomes something akin to a search engine in itself, and a specializes search engine at that.

The review predicts that this new kind of search engine may be a predictor of services to come, and leaves the reader wondering how Ambiently will continue to evolve.

Read Write Web claims that Ambiently works best for specific topics and is not as useful if you are looking for suggestions for similar things to the site you are viewing.  For example, clicking on ambiently from that specific blog post doesn't lead to other blogs on the same topic, but it does lead to other blogs and sites that referred to it.  The article says that Ambiently could be useful, especially if you are

researching unique topics which you're having trouble locating through traditional search engine queries. But before we can say that this search tool will actually become a part of our daily routine, we'll have to live with it for a bit longer.

Actually, I used Ambiently to search for reviews on amiently.  And I did find that many sites that popped up weren't really original sites on the same topics, but were blogs and articles writing about the specific article I had started out on.  Nevertheless, it was still useful for finding unique sites about the topic.

 

More on ambiently

When I do a Google search for "meditation psychology," I get 5,270,000 results that cover a very broad range of subjects.  Once I've found an article that actually matches what I am looking for, I'd much rather have a tool that finds for me other articles like it, instead of going back to google and looking through the remaining 5, 269,999 articles and sites and blogs and reports and studies...

Ambiently is great because it picks out the articles that match exactly what you are searching for, without you having to come up with the right search terms.

This is really helpful if you are looking for articles related to the psychological and physical effects of meditation.  If you just do a google search on this topic, you are bound to get a lot of articles that only deal with meditation or only psychology... or that have both words somewhere in the site but don't really provide the insight you are looking for.  Once you have found a website that integrates the topics of meditation and physical/psychological well-being in the way you intended, then you can use ambiently to find related sites.  This way, you can find other sites that also talk about the benefits of meditation for the body and mind.

For example, if you are interested in learning more about how yoga increases immune functioning, and you have found a great article via Google or Yahoo, then you can use this article to find other relevant articles and gain even more information on the topic. Just go to the site, click on the Ambient Page tab on your tool bar, and voila! You've got a list of websites that are all related to the subject of interest. It's simple as that.

Hopefully I have convinced you that this tool is really really useful, especially if you are interested in learning everything there is to know about meditation and its many benefits.

ambiently: like a search engine, but cooler.

It's finally here: the first discovery engine.  Unlike a normal search engine that just directs you to websites based on search terms that you type in, ambiently provides a list of websites related to the site you are currently viewing.

Ambiently is a "startup company developing web discovery engine applications" with headquarters in Houston, Texas.

This application is really easy to use. You don't need to sign up or install anything.  Just go to the site's homepage and drag the toggle button that says "ambiently" to your toolbar. That's it. Then you should have a tab every time you open your browser that says "Ambient Page."

This is a great tool for research, whether you are doing it for school/job or just personal interest.  Say you find a website that has some insightful information on the topic of interest, but you want to see what additional insight you can get from other sites.  Instead of going back to your Google search results, just click on the "ambient page" tab on your toolbar.  On the top of the page, you'll see a small summary of the page you were viewing.  Next to it is a "tweet this" link, for those of you who twitter.  Underneath is a list of "ambient links," or links to related sites, along with a little blurb that gives you an idea of what is on the site (much like Google search results).  I tried out this process myself, starting from yogictrance and clicking on the ambiently tab.   It brought up a a list of sites and blogs dedicated to yoga, including a website about Savasana (a type of yoga), an article about using yoga to reduce stress and improve health, and a blog on yoga and meditation articles.

Ambiently is a new kind of search engine. In some ways, it is better than the old kind of search engine.  Obviously, you can't use ambiently until you have a starting point.  So in most cases it will be necessary to use Google or Yahoo or whatever you prefer to find one website on whatever topic you wish to learn more about.  Once you have found this site, it is much simpler to use ambiently to find similar sites than to go back to the search engine and devise a query or search term.  Sometimes, it is really hard to think of the right search words that will yield the best results:

One of the biggest problems with today’s search is that we often know roughly what we want, but cannot easily get the right query. Sometimes, our need is broader than a simple query can describe. With Ambiently, there is no such need. You get relevant web information by one click.

This is useful for any discipline.  I found it particularly useful  for researching topics related to meditation and yoga.  If you come across an article that relates to whatever you are studying, then a search engine that brings up sites relevant to that article would be the most effective way to keep researching that topic.

Ambiently is a great research tool. It's a search engine, but better ... maybe not in every way, but it's still pretty useful. I'm definitely going to use it.