Back when the Internet was a baby there were dozens of search engines vying for your business. They weren't all very good, some of them were quite useful for specific things but absolutely useless for everything else. Then came Google. Google is like Coca-Cola in a world with no Pepsi. You've got your RC Cola (Yahoo!) and your PC Cola (MSN) but no-one is really putting up too much competition, which is too bad because Google often sucks!
What I hate most is that does not make it easy to specify that you would like to search for something based on the date it was published on the Internet. Of course you can do this by going to "Advanced Settings" yada, yada, but still this is cumbersome and not very precise. A lot of things I want to search have to do with fairly recent technology an/or news. For example if I want to quickly figure out how to do something with the latest version of iTunes and I type in my query expecting the search engine to understand that information from 2004 is useless I am SOL.
What I would like is for there to be an easy expression I could type in (for ex. "After July 2008") or a graphical interface that is not buried deep within the settings. Of course Google does not want to give me the power to rank my own searches because this will effect their advertising business, which is another thing that annoys me. I don't search for stuff on the Internet as a consumer, I search as a person looking for information. Google began as a project that was dedicated to providing relevance over commercialism but quickly devolved when $$$ was mentioned. I want a search engine that is not looking to make a fast buck on links I never click. Actually I don't care if they appear at the top in a box, goodie for them, I'd even be willing to be submitted to a five second text ad if I could get the results the way I wanted them.
What if, and I know this is crazy, but what if you could get search results in columns like you do when you search for something on your computer. Then you could click on the grouping that was the most useful to you such as: Last Posted, Relevance (to keywords), number of hits, source (i.e. what is the root URL where this page is found). The person who develops a search engine and/or browser with this kind of capability will be the person who kills Google's half-assed search engine once and for all. If I knew anything about programing I'd do it myself, but I'm just a shlub who has to use these dam machines.
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3 comments:
Well... granted, it might be nice if those date filters were a little more accessible, but they are still only 2-3 clicks away - and are such options even available in Yahoo or MSN? It seems to me that google gives you a huge amount of control over searching. Now, the display may not be exactly what you want, but there are virtual "plugins" that interface with google and re-configure the results. I found one called "googleplus" - found by searching in google, of course! There's also a newish search engine called cuil.com which at least tries to be innovative with the results display, even if their search is kind of sketchy at times.
Honestly, google might often suck, but I think most of the others often suck more.
Yes the others do suck more, which is why I (and everyone else I know) still use google. But google still sucks. I don't want to have to click two or three times to get moderately more useful results, I want a search engine that's smarter and more intuitive to use, and perhaps just a little nicer to look at.
You are wrong google does not give you "huge" control, it gives you relatively more control than other engines (although if I knew a bit more search language I could probably get more out of google than I do). It's like being in a desert and seeing one small scummy pond that is slightly larger and less scummy than the other ones you've seen. Of course you will drink deep and feel more satisfied, but in reality the water will still taste like shit.
I checked out cuil, your right the display of results was quite good. I didn't really dig to deep, but you gotta figure with a name as difficult to remember and as unnatural to spell as cuil (unless this is a word from another language?) that these guys are going nowhere! But then again I guess people said the same thing about google.
I don't know - I kind of disagree. I remember using google waaaay back around when they first came out - 1997-98? Anyways, what I remember the most was that their search results were incredibly more accurate than any other search engine I was aware of at that time, and this was when they were nobody. I do feel that they have maintained that "lead" over other engines - try using cuil a bit more and see if you don't agree (btw they claim the name comes from gaelic, but I've seen people disagree with that...) I think what you want out of google, perhaps even more so than the arrangement of the results, would be an easier way to search for what you want without having to go through a lot of hassle - a more obvious, intuitive way to get information. A "natural language search" interface, which I believe they must be working on - even if they don't say so... check out powerset.com
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