

The search-engine dilemma - senthil_rajasek
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/search-engine-dilemma/story.aspx?guid=%7B89E105B8%2DE006%2D4C80%2D99AA%2D0E18B9228534%7D 
What is really needed are new and better search engines. To be honest about it, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all stink. 
"We all know this is true. Sure, you can find the major and obvious sites with any of them. But seriously try and find, for example, the best knitting site."
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ssanders82
Dvorak is rambling. "To do its job, Google has to maintain up-to-date and
redundant copies of the entire Internet on its servers. It's a ridiculous
idea." What??? It's ridiculous? Someone forgot to tell Google. By his measure,
archive.org ("The Wayback Machine") would be preposterous.

At any rate, for 95% of all targeted Google searches I make, I can find the
answer I'm looking for _without leaving the search results page_. It appears
in the search result entry, highlighted by my keywords.

Is "search" broken? Maybe, if you mean that Google can't tell me "the best
knitting site". But who can? For me, Google is a fulltext search of a billion
pages. And that <u>works</u>. <div class="ericcartmanisawesome">yes, I know
news.YC doesn't parse the previous underline tag. But, if you're reading this
site, you do.</div>

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jorgeortiz85

      Google Inc. bought a once-nifty newsgroup search engine
      called Deja News and let it languish over time to become
      largely useless.
    

Google Groups is largely useless?? That's news to me. I'm subscribed to over
20 groups and use at least five of them on a daily basis and at least ten on a
weekly basis.

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michael_dorfman
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time Dvorak actually said something
relevant? Anyone remember back that far?

Today's choice quote: _"Go ahead: Type in the keywords "best knitting site"
into Google and tell me which site, out of the 300,000-plus results Google
returns, is really the best knitting site. It cannot be done, despite the fact
that there must be a best one."_

No, John, actually it's not at all clear that there "must be a best one."
There are probably lots of sites that are best for differing purposes and
contexts and sets of values, and you're going to have to type something
slightly more sophisticated that "best knitting site" into a search engine to
find them. If you walk into a library and ask for the best book on knitting,
don't you think the librarian will ask some follow-up questions, to get a
better feel for what you are looking for?

