4 ways to be smarter in an age of information overload

Stay relevant with the right information

We live in an age where information is everywhere. How do you make sense of so much information?

Every day more people add photos, movies and text to social media sites. In 2008, Google announced the number of pages on the web was over 1 trillion.

Even the amount of technical information in our industry is huge. For example, SPE papers number over 170 thousand. There are over ten times that many documents in AppIntel AI.

But being smarter will help your company find great ways to improve oil production and reserves. Being smarter will help you avoid failures of others. Oil companies want to hire the smartest people they can find. Being smarter helps you keep employed.

AppIntel AI contains ten times more documents than SPE papers. You can find more information about successful (and failed) technical ideas implemented at a field level in AppIntel AI than anywhere else.

How do you make sense of so much information? You need to limit your consumption to relevant information. Here's 4 ways to be smarter about our industry.

1. Alerts

No one has the time to read all day in hopes to get smarter. Just finding the right information in the sea of data takes too long. You need relevant information -- and you need it fast.

The first way to be smarter is to get alerts about relevant information. Don't schedule time to read every submission. Instead arrange to have all new enhanced recovery schemes within 20 miles of your operation sent to you automatically. Or get an alert on all thermal experimental oil sands schemes within 50 miles of Christina Lake.

Alerts are much cheaper than having your team spend time searching the IAR daily or weekly. In fact, you can buy unlimited alerts for less than 10% of the cost of a low level technician.

2. Watches

The second way to be smart: When you find a new operation proposed by a competitor, set up an automatic watch on it. Get an email every time there's a change while it is being reviewed by the regulator. Get an email every time there's a new request for information. Get an email whenever there's a new document uploaded.

3. Search

The third way to be smart is to search for the information you need using full text search rather than by browsing. Search through historic AppIntel AI documents for 'non condensable gas injection' or 'asp in the mannville'.

When the web was young, you could only find information on it by following links on the 'front page' of AOL or another internet service provider. Then came Yahoo! Someone called it the table of contents of the web. Google and others followed quickly with full text search to allow you to search for relevant information using a few key words.

That's what AppIntel AI does for industry information. That is how you find the needle in the haystack full of needles.

4. Mapping of others

Fourth, seeing the mapping of others in an area of your interest helps you quickly get up to speed. Whether you are exploring, infilling, or acquiring, seeing others' interpretations helps you focus quickly and improves your confidence in presentation.

Like one of our subscribers, imagine you found the mapping over a play where a land sale is proposed. You could use the mapping to understand the play quickly and the point of view of the person who posted the land. If you like the play, you can win at the land sale.

And one bonus way to be smarter in the information overload age...

5. Avoiding the mistakes of others

How can you truly evaluate the risk of an operation without the downside — without seeing the epic fails?

Technical papers rarely cover epic fails. Textbooks ignore them. Conferences avoid them.

AppIntel AI helps you weigh the risks — shows you failures as well as successes from the submissions of the industry to the regulator.

AppIntel AI helps you find what you need. Fast.

Tags: AppIntel advantage, AI in oil and gas

Granger Low   Updated 22 May 2026

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