We have completed the information gathering for this survey. We concluded that the most pressing issue is not the quality of search results or the quality of the underlying documents but mainly accessibility of them. This is quite a challenging problem and we have decided to move on and pursue other ideas!
You may check out https://Ctrl-F.me, a tool that you can use to create your own search space from a list of websites and documents.
Thank you for your interest!
We are a fresh (and still nameless) startup that aims at providing people that build difficult things with tools that help them find high-quality information and answers faster.
We have a background in aerospace engineering and software development and multiple years of experience of working in the startup world. We understand that engineers want to spend their time building and testing new products and solving problems, and not reading and writing endless documents (and ironically, filling in surveys).
The focus of this survey is on any kind of information retrieval that you have to do online or offline, in order to solve a problem that you have at work or other professional purposes. Think of anything like:
- Doing a quick Google search
- Reading text books and skimming through papers
- Reading technical reports
- Looking up specifications, standards, requirements
- Reading internal company documentation
- Checking out open source repositories
We assembled this little survey to find out where we can add the most value. It takes about 5-10 minutes to complete. The survey is anonymous, with the exception of optionally providing an email address at the end.
Thank you for taking the time to have a look at it!
