SearchResearch (9/11/26): New AI ways of finding hard-to-find things

 I'm sure this has happened to you... 

... you vaguely remember something that you read, possibly from years ago.  You can mostly remember it, but there's no way you'll dredge up the exact reference or the exact details from your memories. You're trying to find exactly the right wire to pull from a tangled mess.  

We all take notes, but if you can't remember enough of the details to search your notes, you might not be able to retrieve that thing that sits there on the edge of memory, a slightly faded dream-vision that's just beyond your grasp.  

Now, of course, we have AI-augmented search. Here's a nice example of one such search I did this week.  

Case in point:  While talking with a colleague at work, I semi-remembered a fascinating paper about how the results of a behavioral study would change significantly if you have an all-female lab assistant crew caring for and tending lab mice versus an all-male crew.  

With Gemini, you could just do a simple description of this half-forgotten result and get the answer back immediately.  Here's what I did, asked a short and sweet question:   

This isn't even an especially coherent statement--it just has all of the parts needed.  ("Testosterone" "male" "lab animal studies" and "profoundly affect the outcome")  

The result was quite good: 

And of course, I clicked on the links (ScienceDaily and Gwern.net) to get to the original source papers. They are: The scent of a man: Gender of experimenter has big impact on rats' stress levels, explains lack of replication of some findings (published in Science Daily, 2014) and  Olfactory exposure to males, including men, causes stress and related analgesia in rodents (published in Nature America, 2014) 

Why is this important? The study sent shockwaves through the clinical research community because it helped explain long-standing issues with the reproducibility of behavioral and pharmacological studies. It demonstrated that something as simple as the gender of the lab assistant could profoundly alter experimental outcomes, leading many scientific journals and labs to subsequently mandate the reporting of experimenter sex in behavioral studies.

More generally.. .One of the consequences of fast/cheap/easy search tools is that you can dig more deeply into the material than was plausible before.  Do so!  

For instance, I'm now re-reading East of Eden, by John Steinbeck (first time since high school). I found that I've forgotten most of the story, and I find myself constantly stumbling over terms and concepts that I'm sure I didn't know in high school, and almost certainly never looked up at the time.  Words like timshel or paregoric just slipped beneath my radar.  But being able to quickly dive more deeply into these concepts certainly makes the rest of the story more meaningful.  

Search is awfully handy, and AI-based search lets you pull out exactly the right wire you've been looking for in the rat's nest of mental cabling.  

SearchResearch Lessons 

1. You can often retrieve even vaguely remembered articles with a straightforward AI search.  The cost and time of tracking down important ideas is very low--do it, rather than relying solely on fallible memory.  

2. IMPORTANT: Sometimes the AI can get it wrong--you still need to verify the finding.  

3. Don't over-specify the details of the thing you seek.  Note that I did not say "in mice" in my query, but just left it as the more generic "lab animals."  

Keep searching.