# Findability Findability is how easily something can be found. [[Peter Morville]] defines it in [[Ambient Findability (Book)|Ambient Findability]] (2005) as "the quality of being locatable or navigable", and he looks at it at two levels: - **Item findability**: how easily a particular object can be discovered or located - **System findability**: how well a system or environment as a whole supports navigation and retrieval The two levels fail in different ways. A single item can be impossible to find in an otherwise well-organized system (a note with a vague title and no links). And a system can be hard to move through even if each item in it is well described (thousands of good notes with no structure connecting them). ## Findability in a PKM system Both levels apply to a vault: - **Each note** becomes findable through its name, aliases and properties: the words and attributes you'll remember later (see the [[Encoding specificity principle|encoding specificity principle]]) - **The vault as a whole** becomes navigable through folders, tags, links and the daily-note timeline: the paths that lead you to a note when you don't know its name I'm convinced that findability is mostly decided before you search: when you capture a note, name it, give it a type, a few properties and links. Search, queries, navigation and AI can only exploit what you put there. My [[Findability stack|findability stack]] breaks this down into six layers, from structure and names (built at capture time) down to full-text and AI search (spent at retrieval time). ## References - Morville, P. (2005). *Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become*. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 9780596007652 - Interview by Liz Danzico, "Findability is Ambient" (2005): https://bobulate.com/?p=1136 - Book review quoting the Chapter 1 definition (Slashdot, 2006): https://books.slashdot.org/story/06/01/02/1748219/ambient-findability ## Related - [[Findability stack]] - [[Peter Morville]] - [[Ambient Findability (Book)]] - [[Information Architecture (IA)]] - [[Personal Information Management (PIM)]] - [[Encoding specificity principle]] - [[LATCH]] - [[Obsidian Search]] - [[The Complete Guide to Obsidian Search - Find Any Note When You Need It (Article)]] - [[Why You Can't Find Your Notes - The Science of Re-finding Information (Article)]]