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>
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?
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.
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>