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Digging Holes in Google
Kurt LoVerde writes "Though google has become synonymous with searching, the folks over at MSN have written up an interesting article on our favorite search engine's pitfalls. Included among these are a tendency to skew results toward shopping, a lack of diversity for searches containing synonyms and its impact on research."
Not that MSN doesn't have a vested interest in some other search engine or anything.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
Aren't microsoft on the verge of releasing their googleslaying search engine (or perhaps just search marketing) on the world.
How nice on an impartial journalistic source to pick holes in google which are almost certainly specific areas which microsoft has chosen to optimise.
We tend to forget that:
1. Just because it's not found on the Internet, does not mean that it doesn't exist.
2. Just because it's found on the Internet, does not necessarily make it true.
.sig
They actually ripped off Dr. Garfield. The article should have mentioned that.
I won't say it. It's too obvious...
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Well, since Microsoft has already announced plans to try to topple Google as a search engine, I'm pretty much going to take anything that they say with a grain of salt, if I don't just ignore them completely.
Google does an excellent job with their primary searches, their news siphoning, and their froogle.google.com service. I've found more useful results through Google than I have through all of the other search engines that I've used over the years combined. Sometime I'll have to try out their newsgroup tool.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
One of the flaws is a seeming preference towards articles rather than books. Hopefully Amazon's upcoming book text search will fill the gap left by google's seeming inability to find results from books.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
And we're supposed to believe that MSN Search's results won't be skewed toward MSN Shopping and MSN Content? Google may not be perfect, but at least it's independent of the industry giants. For now anyway.
It does seem true that when you are looking for information on a product, that 9 out of every 10 results will be a page trying to sell you the item, not a page with useful information about the product (beyond the normal marketing speak you get when someone is trying to sell you something).
"look for apple and you have to troll through three pages of ... before you find apple computer ..."
Um, how about using more than one keyword?
"apple computer" brings www.apple.com as the FIRST link.
I imagine if I look in msn.com for "battery" I won't find detailed schematics of NiMH batteries either. Holy shit, are they paying these people to write this shit?
Heck, even in grade school when we had to use CD encyclopedia's we were taught to use more than one keyword.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Hmmm.... seems to me the author of the article is not very good at searching for things. Typically, you want something more specific than "apple" in your search. If I looked for apple in the library, I am sure I would find a lot of things that I am not necessarily interested in.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
Maybe try searching with "flower gardening" next time.
word.
Mod me down if you must but this article is crap. Sure Google is going to give you several pages of links to Apple Computer when you search for 'apple' - that's the way the system is supposed to work. However, if you do a multi-word search for something specific - like 'kixtart audit software', you're going to start seeing success. A search for 'apple trees' finds the top four links pointing to great sites that each link to more sites on apples. Same thing for 'tulips' - 'planting tulips' brings up several relevant links within the top 10. Moral of the story is the same as it is everywhere - GIGO.
Remember when the only search engines were archie and Altavista (the old altavista.digital.com, not the "new" one.) Well I certainly do. Google was a quantum-leap improvement over any of them; spidering had been tried with other search engines, but Google made it work. While it certainly has gotten LOTS more commercialized since I first used it, it's still better than anything else out there. I just hope they can stay off of the slippery slope to being clogged with ads.
Unfortunately, computers can't read the minds of dumb people yet....so the rest of the world will need to settle with flowers -shop so that most pages they find are not shops... Searching for something as generic as 'flowers' is the same as searching for 'car'. We typically don't walk into a library anymore and know there is no place to buy flowers there. We know that we're in a world where the Internet is a portal to a) buying and b) information. (Might I add that I think most people buy flowers more often than they grow them?)
--<Mike>--
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, if you search for 'apple', don't be surprised when the first 50 links refer to the Apple Macintosh Computer in one way or another. The smart person does then exclude the terms 'compuer' and 'macintosh' from the search term, and voila, a usable result. The not-so-smart (msn) person calls google biased.
The same goes for the dvd player. Add 'review' to your search query.
And the same goes for the pdf thing. Just include 'book' in your search term.
I think the msn people didn't quite figure out how a search engine works.
...they'd know that to get better searches you narrow down, not generalize. The general approach of search engines of telling you to "generalize" your search terms is a poor approach to addressing their limited indexing--it's created searchers who don't realize that words have multiple definitions and that only their context gives us a clue as to which definition to use.
If this Salon author were a student of mine (not that I'm a teacher) I'd have slapped an F on his research methods paper.
What foolishness.
***Foucault is watching you..***
Too many commercial sites - True, and I wouldn't be surprised if google didn't allow an option soon to limit sales sites. It's feasible, and they often rise to this sort of challenge (like they did with the blog horde).
Synonym problems - This is certainly not something MSN will help with. This is also easy to get around my a little massaging of the search engine - you just think of a word that would come up in the stuff you want to see and not the other. For the retarded, perhaps Google could dynamically suggest categories after searching (kind of how they suggest misspellings).
No books for scholarly research - this is such a small use (though I am admittedly among them). Furthermore, it's not that great a problem if journals come up preferentially - if your research cites mostly books, that's a problem anyway, as it probably means your research is not current. But again, this is a problem for such a slight proportion of the population.
Bottom line is that google will fix any big problems - just think of how many things might have been on that list 3 years ago that they've already fixed. Put it this way - I have more faith in google to deliver a great search engine than I do MS any day.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
i think all of these "google-holes" are actually just the result of poor searching techniques on the part of the author.
also, when i need to find something on--damn i hate to say it--MSDN for work, i usually use google with the site:msdn.microsoft.com as the MS search engine is crap.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
paraphrased from one of the authors replies
"obvious if you look for steven you won't find specific people [spielberg in this case], that's the googlebias I am trying to demonstrate".
That isn't a bias. Its unspecific you nimrod.
A bias would be if you searched for "steven spielberg" and it returned links from only one website [e.g. a paid advertiser or something]. If you are just not specific enough you will get anything that matches.
The author should have pointed out searching for "steven" on search.msn.com also returns many random links such as Dell steven, msn steven, etc...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The fact that the pages are in the index, just further down is not an example that the program has blind spots, but rather if search on generic items it will bring the most likely search results based on your meagre help. If I take the author's example of 'apple' you see how weak an argument this is. If I simply use this single word then the results will be the most likely - apple computers. If I had a brain in my head I could do the following and get TOTALLY different results:
;)
"apple computers"
"apple records"
"apple trees"
If you want to do research on apples, then you better be doing more than typing 'apple' into google.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer
In my mind this is not a flaw, but a feature. In fact I rely on this every day. Type in "Axis" and I go to the Apache site, not a page about WWII or math. Type in "Python" and I do no go to a page about snakes or comedy troupes.
Granted, the article does state that technophiles have skewed Google's results in my favor, but I am fully aware of this. If I did want to know about apples, for instance, I would use a search term of, say, "apple growing" (5th link down). If I want to know about the Axis powers in WWII, I would first enter "axis powers" (third link down).
It's not broken. Users must be aware of the Web's zeitgeist.
You dumbass... learn to read.
The article says that you have to dig through 50 results to get to the first one relating to fruit. Not computers.
Of course, the simple solution would be to search for "apple fruit" instead of simply "apple." But that's far too obvious, isn't it?
Seriously, I have a lot of respect for Google (it's my IE home), but it's pretty obvious that it only can access certain types of information. I think the MSN folks were just looking to poke holes in their rival with that comment about it skewing research. If you are doing a serious research project, you go where researchers from time immemorial have gone--the library.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
A Google search for Arial seems to work pretty well today. You get links to places that sell Arial fonts, articles about choosing fonts, rants from people who don't like it, etc. It doesn't return a link to every page that uses it.
I think MSN is wrong in listing those things as "shortfalls" of google. Many of those shortfalls are what many people think are good features of google. I like the fact that more pdfs show up in google, and I can view them directly without having to go to those websites.
When I search for something on google, what I expect to come up, comes up. If I expect shopping sites, they come up. If I expect game review sites, they come up. If I expect wacky news sites, they come up.
I'll never use MSN, mostly because of popups, they're microsoft, and also they try to sell their internet service almost as forcefully as AOL does. And they have the wrong idea of what people want from their search engines.
Google isn't perfect. It has drawbacks and it has built-in problems. But, it works. What more can you ask for from a search engine?
Also, I can never appreciate a company that uses multicolored butterflies as their logo, especially when said butterflies appear as men dressed in tights rollerskating around. I've had enough trauma in my life without being exposed to men in tights trying to sell me MSN and other Microsoft products. Ugh.
I got this far in the article and couldn't take it anymore. The guy that wrote this article obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
Obvious
/Obvious
Type in what you're looking for! Want info on growing apples? Search for - *gasp* 'growing apples'!!! Want apple computers? Search for 'apple computers'. If this doesn't get you what you want, refine your search.
Google does have a tendency to skew results towards shopping, though. Just because Microsoft says it's so doesn't mean that it's untrue. A lot of the time when I'm trying to find out information about something, I find zillions of links to where I can buy it, but very little actual information about the thing in question. It's really annoying.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Of course you're going to have this. These companies spend millions of dollars making sure their pages are coming to the top of EVERY search engine, including Google. If somebody is searching for information about apples, they will search for "apples" not "apple". And if you search for "apples" you get a page entitled "Apples & More" with the description "Learn all about apples, growing and using them...".
The same can be said for the stupid comparison to flowers. Of the idiots who search for "flowers" for information about a research paper (those who know nothing about flowers), they will soon see that "information about flowers" "flower biology" and "flower development" turn up more relevent and less commercial terms.
Of course, if I searched for "design" I'd get a trillion pages about web design. But what if I was searching for "interior design". That's completely different.
It'd be sad if people were this stupid. But the reality is that people know what they're looking for and how to find it. I give this article a -1 STUPID.
Kind regards, Devon H. O'Dell
I agree that the article is weak. It begins by assuming that Google should be something it isn't (a search engine that reads your mind) and then criticizes it for failing. Other posts mention that the author's examples use one search term, while google allows up to 10. This could be similar to complaining that the dictionary is skewed towards "aardvarks" if you are trying to look up "application" using only the first letter, instead of the first ten.
I thought that the last section of the article was the most clueless, though. The author complains that "we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal." No kidding. First, it isn't clear that his assertion is true, and second, even if it were true, it would be good, not bad, since the barrier to entry for ideas would be lower. He also complains that google doesn't search the NYT, and so it doesn't find the most relevant material. He acts like this is somehow a failing of google, when a rational person would consider it to be a failing of the NYT. How can any single search engine find material on the web if it is hidden behind subscriptions?
My paranoia says the author has another agenda (see posts re: MSN = evil). Common sense says he just needed to get something out by deadline. The easy way to do this "hackneyed demagogue," according to Adam Thrasher.
To be a bit fair to the article, I kind of agree to the shopping part.
The other day , I was googling for a perticular recipe and all I got was a list of restaurants,No matter how i rephrased my search, All the first 50-60 results were links to restaurants, which serve that dish, but nothing of the recipe.
Belive me if it were any other search engine , I wouldn't have even bothered , as don't expect any thing but ads from non-google search engines
Similarly I was googling for some extra information about the song stargazer from rainbow, and all i got was lyrics pages or links to CD sell.
O.T. :- IF any one can provide me with a link to more information on stargazer i would be much obliged
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Let's review this statement. The author states that no one puts up books in PDF form, and therefore, Google doesn't search these books? How is this a problem? If the book isn't online in the first place, html/pdf/whatever format, then how can Google possibly give you links to that book? Google is not a search engine *AND* a library, it is a search engine. The article seems to imply that Google is taking away from something else. The only thing I can think of is using Google for research vs. traditional methods of research, i.e., library work. If that is the author's arguement, then they are about 4-6 years behind the times, because the switch has already happened, or at least it has amongst my generation.
I haven't done research in a library since 5th grade (11 years ago).
I for one don't see how any search engine can read the minds of an individual user. If I type in "apple", how is Google supposed to know what I mean? It's like going up to someone in the street and asking where the "restaurant" is. The first thing the person will ask is, "which one?". Or going to the car dealership and asking for the "car".
I think our society still has the mentality that computers should be able to do anything and everything and when they don't, something must be broken. People always complain that their computer doesn't do what they want it to do and so it must be flawed. We've all heard it..."web pages load to slowly, I can't find what I'm looking for, this program has too many menus", etc. Well, I would like my car to lift off and fly during rush hour, but it's not. Do I complain that my car is flawed? No, I just accept that there are limitations as to what certain things can do at present. Perhaps my car will one day be able to take off and fly much like someday a search engine will have a better idea of what you are looking for.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
... or is the author of the article the bias one? Of course if I were to research flowers in terms of gardening or botany, I'd specify that. 'gardening flowers' or 'flowers life cycle'. He expects the search engine to read his mind when you write 'apple' and mean the fruit, not the computer brand? 'apple computers' and 'apple fruit' would be what I'd type into the search engine. Google's ranking means whatever is popular on the internet gets ranked up top (by whatever else links to it). If more people on the internet link to the apple website, than aunt dora's apple farm them so be it.
Yes.
Google is just another tool. Like any tool, it's not responsibile for the level of skill of the user. A tool may have all the whiz-bang capability in the world, but if the weilder is lacking in skill, then none of that function matters.
The MSN article was ridiculously lame. If you want to find DVD reviews, search on "DVD +review" and you'll get pages of them, starting with the very first page. In other words, in order to effectively use Google, or any search engine, one has to know how to construct the query. Expecting a single word search to discriminate down to the level of detail that any given person wants is hopelessly naive. Besides, Google has never made any prestence about having a commercial slant.
MSN's apparent expectation that google ought to accomodate those with enough skill to get on-line, but not much more than that, is just more of their corporate bias leaking through.
Apparently basic computer literacy isn't a requirement for doing technical reporting on MSN. The examples given are just silly.
They complain that a search for "flowers" mostly returns commercial sites, not information on gardening tips. What is Google supposed to do, read your mind to determine your real intention? "Flowers" might mean you want to buy some flowers, look at pictures of flowers, get information growing your own flowers, buy some flower seeds, or be looking for a company or person with the "Flowers" name. Useless. However, if you try the crazy idea of asking for what you want, amazingly you're much more likely to get the results you want. Interested in gardening tips? Don't search for "flowers", instead search for "gardening tips". Oooh, look, lots of useful links. Interesting in flower gardening tips specifically? Unsurprisingly, "flower gardening tips" returns a slightly different set of relevant links.
Searching for a product's model number doesn't return reviews? Again, if you want a review, maybe you should ask for a review. Sure enough, "apex ad1200" primarily returns places to buy the DVD player, but just adding review to the search term returns useful results. (Yes, Dealtime does jump to the top of the list, but that page does have several reviews on it.)
Oh no, search for "apple" doesn't return any information on artist Fiona Apple for many pages. Maybe you should actually search for "fiona apple"? Don't remember her first name? Try "apple female artist" or apple female musician" which return some good pointers (notably to her first name, which will return even better results.
"apple" doesn't get you information on the fruit? Well, step one is search refinement. Prior to Google people spent lots of time refining searches. Just because Google often does what you want doesn't mean you'll never need to refine your search. So, let's be a bit more specific. Let's try "apple fruit" Viola, hits on the fruit. Want to learn about growing apples? How about "growing apples" Wow, more good hits.
Google doesn't index sites with non-public archives (like the New York Times ? Well, duh. They also don't sneak into your house and index your tax returns. By requiring registration to access their archives, the New York Times has effectively declined to be indexed. Expecting Google to circumvent that decision is stupid.
On the subject of Google not magically indexing everything, we get to the extremely silly complaint that doing research using Google tends to steer people only to online sources, not books. Again, duh. Similarly, if you use your local library's card catalog (or more typically, online catalog), it will only return books and magazines, not web pages. The points to two things. First, if you're doing Real Research, limiting yourself to a single source (be it online or in a library) is just dumb. Second, the internet is rising in importance, and perhaps publishing books online is a good idea.
Google is doing so well that lots of people are interested in taking potshots at it. I'm all in favor of people challenging the status quo, but try to have some real complaints.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Plus everyone seemed to miss this bit of the article:
You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.
Which is a fair enough point. Sometimes what I'm looking for is not what Google thinks I'm looking for and I have to tailor my searches somewhat.
But if MS included an option to ignore certain sites (such as shopping, blogs etc.etc) then I'd take a look.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Oh, nevermind.
I find zillions of links to where I can buy it, but very little actual information about the thing in question.
It depends on what you are seaching for. For specific technical information, issues, or opinions, I have found Google groups to be above and beyond anything else. For general information regular Google is fine. Use the right tool for the job.
Searching is an art. I was searching earlier today for VoIP for home use. Checking "voip home use" with a Google web brought up a paid link [1] to Vonage. I scoped out the Vonage site. I then searched for "Vonage". A few other sites not related to Vonage showed up but most hits were Vonage resellers. Having absorbed the official information on Vonage from the various resellers and offical site, I then searched Google groups and found the more technical side of Vonage which also lead me to packet8.net and many opinions and comparisions. There is no right way and wrong way to search. Using multiple options should result in some useful information related to your search.
[1] Off topic here but when I am truely looking for a location to buy something from, I found found the Google paid links on the right side to be the most accurate and useful method of finding a starting point.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I suspect you're either a troll or Just Plain Dumb. I'll assume the latter and get all didactic on your ass.
Google is a research tool: it isn't google's fault that it can't read your mind, you need to learn how to use the tool appropriately. So if you Just search on "Asus A7N8X-X" you might get mostly shopping links (although as a previous poster pointed out, you get this potentially helpful link from Asus as number two on your list), however if you search on "Asus A7N8X-X specs", "Asus A7N8X-X review", or similar, you might get information closer to what you are looking for.
It's not meant to be a tool to "give you what you want", as that would require a psychic.
Absolutely correct. I do volunteer work at a computer lab, and I am amazed at the number of people that type in some vague query and expect razor sharp, relevant results. Anyway, though Google isn't perfect, this article does kind of exaggerate its flaws.
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer--and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple.
Obviously you would come up with stuff about Apple Computer if you typed in "apple." The vast, vast majority of people with the query "apple" would be searching for Apple Computers as opposed to Granny Smiths. Again, if the search engine is used correctly, you can find relevant results just fine. Try "apple fruit -macintosh -mac"
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Google does have a tendency to skew results towards shopping, though.
Well, in the example they used, they did a search for "flowers" and complained they got florist shops. However, if you're really doing research, and do a more specific search (say on "tulips") you don't get that same bias. Rule 1, be specific.
Their complaint about skewing is somewhat valid, but it helps to understand the nature of the web. It lives and breathes computers. So if you search "apple fruit" you get much better results, even better than "apple -computer". Rule 2, disambiguate.
Their complain about books is also valid, but this is an artifact of publishing and IP law. One that may be starting to crumble, given Amazon's recent announcement about offering book search. Rule 3, when there's a real market hole, look for the opportunity for profit.
After having read both the article, and the majority of high-ranking comments here, I must say article is more objective than the majority of comments. Google is not perfect and the article points out some shortcomings. Of course, they are a logical result given how google works, but it can still be argued that some results are less than optimal. Of course, by changing the query you can get better results, but it is also possible that a different page rank algorithm can give better results.
Why not instead discuss algorithms that would give apple, the fruit, the same relevance in search results as it has in most people's lives? If a search engine appeared that added that knowledge to its result ranking, Google would not be on top any longer.
Why do you assume that "MacIntosh" isn't a perfectly valid apple (the fruit) search term? Where do you think that Apple (the company) got the idea from?
I agree with people here in that the points raised by the article are somewhat FUDful. However, I do have a MAJOR problem with Google.
I develop in Perl. If you've ever seen Perl code, (as I'm sure many here have,) you know {it=>"isn\'t"} @the=("most", "friendly"); of languages, syntactically. However, with Google, searching for information is a moot point. Try searching for "$|++" (Search Link). For those who don't want to click on the link, I'll tell you what happens: Google does nothing. That's because it doesn't accept punctuation.
This was particularly annoying when I wanted to do research on URThere's (awful) PDA: the @migo. When I searched for "@migo", I got lots of spanish sites, but nothing relative. Google had internally stripped my "@" symbol.
Granted, I will continue to use Google, as it is the most incredible search engine available right now, but because of these flaws, searching is severely limited.
char sig[120] = "\0"
Adding extra modifications such as -prices or +review will definately help the precision of your search, finding a higher percentage of non-shopping sites, but it will also hurt your recall. What if the best, most in-depth review on-line for a particular product happens to contain the word prices?
Perhaps a line in the review "I've compared prices with similar products, and this one comes out on top"
You really do have to try all kinds of combinations, and scan through pages and pages of unrelated results to be sure not to miss something good.
This isn't a limitation of google, however, its really a limitation of keyword based searching.
"Apples" probably more what the user wanted.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I was searching for "pirelli p3000 tires review" - there are four good links, followed by hundreds of obvious search engine spam. Doing "-sex" doesn't make much appreciable difference.
I liked Google better before it became popular and thus vulnerable to this kind of crap.
What's wrong with his analysis? Where do I start? First let me say that most of his statements are true. They just have no real merit for me.
1) Reference basis. In any scientific analysis you need a baseline. For example, if you wanted to compare the fuel economy of two vehicles, it would be good if you established that the baseline should be something like gasoline powered passenger cars. If you compared the gas consumption of a horse drawn carriage to a Ferrari F40, that's not valid. In this case, no reference baseline was established. He was comparing Google to nothing. What if all his gripes about Google were inherent to all search engines?
To make his points, he should at least have some sort of meaningful comparison between browsers: Well, Altavista doesn't do this but Google does . . . I think he omitted this part because the MSN search engine shows many of characteristics he complains about.
2) Testing methodology. When you test anything, each test has to be narrowly designed to test as few factors as possible, and the desired result has to be achievable. In the fuel economy example, it would be silly to complain how poor fuel economy is in a Ford Explorer if you used uranium as the fuel source.
It's ironic that the subtitle is Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent. He was testing the terms 'apple' and 'flowers', yet he was actually looking for 'growing apples' and 'gardening flowers'. But by searching on vague terms, he assured the test would fail. Additionally without a reference (see #1), we don't if this behavior is normal to search engines or just Google.
3) Objectivity. I don't need to elaborate on this.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
One of the concerns of the article was that Google would skew results towards article material. However almost all original research is published in forms of articles in peer reviewed journals, so having google result skew to articles is not necessarily a bad thing.
Try finding woodcut illustrations of squid on googe, it is impossible.
Umm... how about searching "woodcut squid". Second link. Now, try finding a woodcut illustration of a squid WITHOUT google. I'll accept either URL's or your word that you found one (that you didn't already know about) somewhere in the real world.
Certainly, Google isn't magic. You may need to dig a bit to find your answer. Nonetheless, searches for obscure information are frequently simpler on Google then they are anywhere else, including the real world.
Of course, in the real world, you can go to the library, and search by using there categorized information (for example, go to the "art> woodcuts" section and go from there), but the same thing is true on the web (you can use Google Directory or Yahoo when you need categorized information). Unfortunately, due to the vast content and dynamic nature of the web, the directories are not as well organized or comprehensive as your libraries card catalog, but that's not Google's fault. And of course, going to the library means time, effort, etc. Sure, the actual search time MAY be less, but all told, Google will almost always be faster.
The solution is the same as to most other problems in the world: Use the right tool for the job, and use it in the right way. Choose reasonable keywords (apples instead of apple), and know when the best tool for the job is in fact the library.