Documents and directories as search expressions

Searching is tedious, searching for stuff that is not on the top of your mind is even more tedious. However, when you have read something and find it interesting it is sometimes interesting to follow up on that issue over time. The trouble is that there is never time to do that.

What if instead you could mark some document, paragraph or whatever and say "This is interesting, when you find something related to what's written here, tell me but only if you thing I'd be really interested". Wouldn't that be nice?

How could that be done? Well, of course it has already been done in a fashion, so I'll just point out that Henry Lieberman at MIT made something called Letizia that uses the browse history to offer suggestions to the user. Alexandros Moukas made something called Alamathea that does much of the same, but with the interesting difference that he uses a herd of intelligent agents that compete for the user's attention when they are trying to find interesting stuff.

One way of implementing the "document as search expression" thingy would be to apply an Alamathea-like mechanism to it. It would look for words and concepts listed in the document and then evolve over time to offer relevant advice.