Searching for New Designs

By Peter Varhol

The Internet has changed the nature of how professionals do their jobs, and it continues to do so for design engineers.

  More than a decade ago static but easily updatable Web pages replaced parts and components catalogs with easily searchable data. While it was more of a convenience for finding the information we needed, it heralded a new era in the modern design process.

  Since then, search engines have radically changed our design processes. Finding information became a matter of typing a term or phrase into the search engine. The nice thing about early search engines was that they were fast, and usually provided a useful starting point for further research. They didn’t solve the problem of finding the information needed right away, so engineers used Internet search engines to narrow down the search field, and get ideas of where to look further, but manually.

  The development of Google as the most popular Internet search engine accelerated this trend. Today, we can type in freeform design questions and get back some very specific results. For example, you can name a component and its parameters to see any number of suppliers for that or similar components. Granted, it doesn’t always work this smoothly, but experienced searchers often enter just the right phrase to maximize their chances of getting just the information they want.

  The time saved with today’s search engines is enormous. Engineers can sit at a computer for a couple of hours and find design software, individual components,  and even advice on design techniques, activities that only 15 years ago might take weeks.

  But this is only the beginning of the efficiencies we will see.

  Two very recent developments in search technology have the potential to help design engineers even more, and continue to transform the design process.

Wolfram|Alpha, a new search engine, is rather like an enormous calculator, using information from the Web to synthesize answers to questions. It takes your question and crunches out an entirely new answer, even if the answer isn’t something that’s been posted on the Web before.

  Designed and built by Stephen Wolfram, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship awardee as well as founder of Wolfram Research and creator of the Mathematica symbolic computation engine, Wolfram|Alpha uses the Web as a computational platform and database. While it will provide business and consumer computations, such as stock-price comparisons and travel-price analyses, engineers are most comfortable working with a computational platform.

  As Wolfram|Alpha improves, engineers will find the ability to do product comparisons,  evaluate alternative design approaches, and perhaps even perform basic analyses of components. It has the potential to significantly enhance your ability to do even more legwork on the Web before embarking on future designs. Its slogan is to “make the world’s knowledge computable.”

  Microsoft also has recently announced an enhanced and rebranded Windows Live search engine called Bing. Bing offers several incremental enhancements to modern search engines, including related search terms and the ability to easily find travel comparisons. It also improves image searches so that you can look at designs or components as you search.

  These two examples mean that engineering design is going to continue to evolve over the coming years. The search tools at our disposal are enabling us to have a far better understanding of our design parameters, tools and components, and even analysis of initial design approaches. Internet searches have already made our jobs more manageable as designs grow more complex, and yet the ride has barely begun.

  Peter Varhol has been involved with software development and systems management for many years. Send comments about this column to [email protected].