Time – 3 August 2009
When it comes to search engines, your brain has it all over Yahoo! and Google. If you think of the word airline, your brain makes connections in all kinds of directions: planes, places, faces, food, money — and even airline companies. Plug airline into a search engine and the first thing you get is a list of airlines. Not bad, but it's limited and not necessarily informative. "Your brain is associative," says Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech. "Think of trying to remember the name of someone you met 20 years ago. You don't drill down. You probably try to remember a situation, someone else who was there."