
In Google we trust - but should we? - nreece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/22/internet.google
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xirium
From the article: Google is more vulnerable than people think. It is brilliant
at displaying the answers most linked to - but not if what you want is buried
deep in the search pile. If a nimble startup delivers a more intelligent
engine, people will soon change, as they did when they ditched AltaVista for
Google a decade ago.

In the trivial case, you add more search terms and you find the answer that
you sought. However, there are situations when you are very confident that the
answer is known and published but that you don't know how to find it. This is
a classic resource discovery problem.

There are many techniques to solve this problem including manual and automated
classification, synonyms, semantic search and visualisation. The market may
fragment while the best techniques are found.

~~~
utnick
kind of OT but one feature that seems to be missing from google that i needed
this weekend is that somebody told me the name of a website.

The domain name had two words in it and I could only remember one and I could
also remember what the site was about, I consider myself an expert at finding
things on google but I could not find this site for the life of me

I think the site:x.com modifier needs to accept regexes of domain names
instead of just the domain name so I should be able to search for "python
site:* hacker *.com

~~~
xirium
As a stopgap, try <http://searchdns.netcraft.com/>

Combining this functionality with full text search would be useful.

