Sometimes a friend will send me a cool link to a video or animation or other noteworthy object of interest on the Web. Later I may want to show that same thing to somebody else, but sometimes I can’t find it.
It’s true that I could carry around a SmartPhone, use it to dig through my emails, and either retrieve the link to type it into the browser of my new friend, or else forward the email to them, so they can click on the link.
But why should I need to do that? Why can’t I just type something like “Animated Taiwan deranged 3D characters act out news” into a search window?
It seems to me there should be some sort of inverse search facility, which starts with a URL and converts it into some easy to remember phrase. When you type in that phrase, the top search hit is the site you want.
Is that asking too much?
I am pretty sure Google could do a pretty good job at this if it wanted. For any reasonably popular web page, Google has a long list of queries that lead to that page. Selecting short phrases from those queries that lead to a particular document with high probability would work well for giving you words to use to retrieve the document in the future. Generating reasonable looking natural language from the queries would probably be hard though.