Slashdot Mirror
Better Search Results Than Google?
Mechanik writes "CNN has an AP article about the next generation of up and coming search tools, which try to cope with the glut of hits that result from 'conventional' search engines such as Google. One tool, Vivisimo, "is like a superfast librarian who can instantly arrange the titles on shelves in a way that makes sense. [...] But unlike libraries, Vivisimo doesn't use predefined categories. Its software determines them on the fly, depending on the search results. The filing is done through a combination of linguistic and statistical analysis." Grokker, another, downloadable program, "not only sorts search results into categories but also "maps" the results in a holistic way, showing each category as a colorful circle. Within each circle, subcategories appear as more circles that can be clicked on and zoomed in on." You have to love the author's use of trying to look for a hotel in France with the terms 'Paris Hilton' as an example of searching gone awry."
...until I can regexp my searches. It would make a whole lot of difference.
They aren't off to a very good start:
Problem occurred while using Vivisimo::
Currently under heavy load. Please try again shortly
Please go back to the Vivisimo home page and try your query again
Well, Google made a huge leap forward from the old-guard, of AltaVista & Yahoo, who were in their own way a huge leap beyond what had gone before. We had to expect this to happen sooner or later, but two things spring irresistably to mind.
:-)
1)Will it gain the enormous foothold in the collective consciousness that Google has acquired? To Google is now a verb... and it gets mentioned on Buffy, which is as good a cultural barometer as we are ever likely to have.
2)Will the UI and secondary services (such as the ODP, and Google Groups) be as good as Google itself?
Also, while I'm sure that it will happen one day, I'll believe it when I use it and not before... Oh, and the Paris Hilton thing? LOL! That sort of anti-result comes back from search engines *a lot*. I was just talking to my mom about searches of that type of ambiguous nature the other day.
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
I tried this earlier (around noon) when I saw the article. One of my big complaints is that the searches seem to take too long. Google usually is sub-second searches, this seemed to take about 3-5 seconds (this was well before slashdot posted the article, so it wasn't slashdot effect either).
Also, I already do not like the search results showing up in the sidebar with search engines (with mozilla), as that is one of the features I kill as soon as I install mozilla. So, I guess, this search engine has a ways to go before I prefer it.
The searches didn't seem too bad over all, I tried looking for "linux kodak 4530" and its results were not any better or worse than googles. I tried a couple other searches and they seem to be on target about as well as google though.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
of Antarctica, an old and very clunky Java Yahoo-like engine (sorta). It used a map of Antarctica to drill down into categories and subcategories before putting the user in a 3D world interface at the lowest level. When I interviewed with them, the interviewer did an excellent job of turning me off the technology, explaining that the 3D interface would allow 'billboard and other advertisements' along with the search results formatted in a 'mall or street' of entries.
Gah.
A new search engine comes along that touts its uber intelligent way of searching. It is hyped by the press but ends up by the way side. (See Teoma)
I don't get excited about "Google alternatives". Google satisfies my searching needs as it is. Sometimes "knowing what to search for" is better than a super intelligent search engine.
As far as I'm concerned anyone with a clue can produce the results they need with a little bit of practice and common sense. They don't need new search engines.
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
Glad to see AP covering a site thats been operational for 2 years, nothing like cutting edge reporting.
What if you want that glut of hits? Sometimes you have to dig through some pretty obscure hits on a search to get what you want, and categorizing them or putting them in funny circles just complicates the process and can make the search take longer. I'll hang with Google and Teoma, thank you very much.
And I certainly don't want a downloadable search app running, that's just another possible inroad for spyware. I've been burned enough times by apps I thought were "clean" that went off and chewed up enough bandwidth to choke a horse.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Tried it...too many ads and so I don't quite trust it to give me the kind of pure results I seem to get from Google. I'll wait for Google to implement the same kind of categorization system or at least let other people who have the time test out visimio.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Despite the problems with Google, it's still the best place I've found to get good info. The trick is to be very careful about how you search for something by adding in search modifiers such as "-sale" or "-bargain" or "review" to weed out the overtly commercial results. But even then, things have changed and not for the better.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
you have to admit, this may be the first time we've managed to Slashdot a search engine. Yet another /. milestone!
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
We realized the same idea for images. Take the results from Google Image Search and rearrange them using methods from computer vision.
An article about this is available here: Clustering visually similar images to improve image search engines .
Is there a search engine that can filter out all of those annoying placeholder sites that grab unsuspecting visitors by simply putting every word about a certain subject on a page and then having links to other useless websites? This is 'webspam' as far as I am concerned and the next step in search engine design should be 'placeholder' site aware.
A search engine that ignores specifically commercial sites would also be helpful.
Any ideas on either of these type features in current or upcoming search engines?
"Vivisimo" can *somehow* come up with a better engine than google, will people use it? Google is getting bigger and bigger not necessarily by their search results (or lack thereof) but also because of how the phrase "google" has caught on in mainstream culture. Face it - when your competitor makes it into the dictionary, it's going to be EXTREMELY hard to get people to change the way they search. If you ask many non-techs how they find information on the web, they don't say "I search for it" they say "I google it".
Now, that being said, one thing the CNN article doesn't talk about in great detail is the technology behind this company - Google started out at a major university - what's the background of this company? While I agree something should be done with all the advertising that occurs with PageRank, I find it highly doubtful that it's going to be another company (rather than Google itself) that will fix it.
" and it gets mentioned on Buffy, which is as good a cultural barometer as we are ever likely to have"
Gawd help us. Society now sucks if that is our barometer.
Google, the verb, has been mentioned on Law & Order. _THAT_ tells me it has entered the mainstream.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo sells its technology to companies and intelligence agencies, and offers free Web searches at Vivisimo.com.
Oh boy! Where do I sign up for my free registration! Here's my name, age, adress...
Sigh.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm actually posting this form the browser window of Grokker. Been playing with it for just a few minnutes now, but I can see how something like this can make obscure or broad searches a lot easier. When you enter a search term, Grokker generates a series of circles, each of them representing a subcategory of results for your search term, and each of them in turn filled with subcategories of their own. Searching for "west coast museums", for example, gives me subcategories such as 'travel', 'west coast attractions', and 'history museums'. Once you find your desired subcategory you're presented with a smallish list of matching sites, represented as squares. The categorization seems to make sense most of the time, even if the overall visual effect is remniscent of 70's disco lighting.
I want the fire back.
I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about better ways to interface with data, generally with searches but it applies to most anything. Naturally this was inspired by reading some Sci-Fi (Saturn's Race by Niven and someone...the book is in the other room.) I got to thinking, the perfect interface I can imagine is much like an actual room, things laid out visually where you would expect them. The normal 2D GUI has always seemed a bit unnatural to me.
When this is applied to searches, I'd like to see information grouping, liek was mentioned in circles, although I want it more organic. tree structures, book shelves, whatever is most appropriate to the current search, and I want them interchangable so I can format my view however I think works best. In a web search, I like the idea of a street. The major sites, amazon,com, ibm.com, etc are all represented by nice looking storefronts, but there are also dark alleys I can do down, to find less reputable places. So in this case, information is arranged by reputation of the source.
I haven't quite figured out how to approach this from a coding viewpoint, but surely there are projects out there that try this. WilmaScope for example is a good way to look at certain types of data. Why can't more things have this kind of intuitive interface? 3dDesktop is another attempt at this, but it is a mapping of 2D desktops to a 3D shape. I want more of a visual representation than just a bunch of desktops attached to a sphere. I konw there are others out there, but how about some leads? What have you see/used for intuitive data representation? Why hasn't this taken off?...a search engine which can't handle a slashdotting.
Find funky gifts
Google is about having good quality results with a very simple interface, one that anyone can use. Go to an academic library and look at the various journal search engines like "America: History and Life" or PychINFO, or better yet just try out MedLine. See anything wrong? Busy page, weird syntax, a huge instruction page about "how to search".
Engines like Vivisimo may make it if they can keep Google's simplicity and ease of use and only add value with categorizations. And personally, I think they better get out of 1996 with the frames. Yech!
Man, I must have been sleeping...
When did google become a conventional search engine...?
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
I tried a few searches on Vivisimo before it went live on slashdot and I must say I'm impressed. It addresses one of the main faults of search technology today: context. When you perform a search a tree is shown showing the different contexts (not categories) where the terms were found. Excellent for ambiguous concepts.
But, and here is the beef, it should be obvious to anyone that there must be a interface change in the short term future of search. A textbox is a very limited input to express a complex search. Using regexps and regexp-like operators is not enough. This Vivisimo is a step in the right direction, but there's a lot of way to go through.
For example try to make this search using any engine (Vivisimo, Google, Yahoo, Altavista, etc): who was the red-haired singer that recorded a song with Tom Morello a few years back?. At least I can't find an answer because one of the main aspects I'm using (the red hair) maybe is not as important as other aspects used to describe the situation by anyone else.
There must be a interface revolution in the years to come. Come to think of it, are we still using a textfield to express every possible combination in a google search? Gross!!!
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
I have yet to see a visualization tool that was truly useful. Do people really want to see their results laid out using Cartesian coordinates as result metadata? I don't think so. Its cute but the reality is that people will prefer a list, and more specifically, look at the first five entries. Getting the right links into that top five is all that matters.
...google leaves so much to be desired. Too many paid and crafted links...too many stealth redirects...too many commercial links forced ranked...no AI.
google reminds me of that old pizza commercial with the new employee 'big dummy'. When he finally gets something to do, he runs off exclaiming "I am HELPING!!!" - not
I think you misspelled barfometer
- Donny was a good bowler, and a good man.
I wasn't sure whether it was scripted, but there was a good repartee from her end:
Fallon: Is it roomy inside Paris Hilton?
Hilton: Yeah, might feel a little spacy for you, but other people find it cozy.
or something to that extent
I think Google's search results are worse after their "Florida" update.
alltheweb.com has pretty decent search results.
John Kerry is a Joke!
Well, for an attempt at a better newsbot than Google news, you can check out newsbot here. It does a few things that GN leaves out (XML feeds, PDA version, peer recommendations, etc, etc) and I believe it has a better S/N ratio. End of shameless plug.
You can still find old mirrors of the reverse engineering site, but the only active one I know of is at www.woodmann.com/fravia. The message board is at www.woodmann.net/forum, no crackz, serialz, or warez allowed. Just techniques, tools, etc.
His example of searching for Paris Hilton is nothing more then an glorified example to try to prove his point.
You do not need to completely redign a search engine to get your desired results. You need to refine your search. Search google for Paris Hilton Hotel and the first three results are directly related to a Hilton Hotel in Paris. I would not find this hotel any faster using his circle method with Grokker2. I use a search engine to find exactly what I am looking for. Displaying all the results on some chart, graph, or 3d display still requires me to browse around to narrow my search.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
www.kartoo.com - does what the article states without some other applications having to be installed.
So far Vivisimo is proving to be 100% successful at removing the glut of results. All of them, in fact.
--- What?
I hope what I am writing is not too off-topic. I have found this tendency among people (mostly involved in non technical/scientific jobs) associating top searches for high level of "authencity". It is totally overlooked that top searches are "popular" but might not be of high quality/authencity. Ofcourse, great deal of association can be made between "popularity" and "quality". Better things are more popular.. However, most often popularity (like power) feeds on itself. i.e. Popular links become more and more popular (ofcourse other scenarios exist). There should be some way out..to recognize the quality of information.(slashdot like moderation of all webpages by a search engine is not a bad idea in theory!). So, unless we have search engines that not only come up with popular sites but with more relevant content of high quality there is a lot of scope for improvement. (For instance how does an essay written by a college student through online research compares with that written by library research..). Another area where search engines can make great improvement is search of dynamic pages. "page rank" like algorithms suits well for static data. For instance a highly relavant post on some newsgroup posted *recently* might not show up on your search page! I hope google isn't another future microsoft (oh! did I mention power/popularity feeding on itself before? :) ) stifling innovation.
Search engines can be lot lot lot better..hope they will be soon!
There is a DEFINITE central structure.
Atoms, modifiers, and conjunctions.
Atoms are character classes (letters, ranges, or bracket expressions), conjunctions of said classes, or a paranthetized expression (like in maths).
You have two conjunctions. The first is concatentation is what you get when you put one atom right after another (they both have to appear in that order). The other is alternation (pipe) where either the left atom or right atom must appear.
Finally modifiers are an optional number of repetitions for each atom to match. The default is from 1 to 1 (exactly one). * means from 0 to infiinity, ? means 0 to 1, + means from 1 to infinity, and {x,y} means from x to y.
That's it.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
You can write an infinite loop in alot of regexp packages. They would have to have a way of detecting that ( or a very inefficiently written regexp )
Eat at Joe's.
I have used Vivisimo a few times but never realized that their method of categorization was quite langaage independent.
If it really is then DMOZ, the Human Edited Directory, ought to incorporate dynamic categorizations like this, infact to the point that someday each user should have his/her own unique categorization of the all the websites in the world ...
Meanwhile, are they using the words in the headings to determine categories ? Or is it words that have in some way been emphasized ? And to do this in a way that transcends language ...
I am really curious as to how the words that determine "categories" in a sentence/para/section/page can be identified and sifted away from less important words. And how to determine the "keywords" that are not as important as "categories" but still more important that the "filler words" on the page. Keyword for Google is what you are searching for. That is easy. But how does Vivisimo take it further and establish it as a category?
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
What you ask is more difficult than one may originally think. As soon as a novel approach to counter-acting one of these annoyances becomes popular, it lands itself in the cross-hairs of those who would exploit "the system" in the first place. Witness the current arms race that is SPAM. Witness Microsoft security. Hell, witness Slashdot moderation.
There are a number of bright people on both sides of the aisle. When one side discovers a new technique, the other will work hard to neutralize said technique. This continues until either: it is too expensive for one side to continue, or too complicated for the consumer to bother with anymore.
Disclaimer: Just kidding, not work safe.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
human languages, there's no central structure.
I think if you spoke to any linguistics major, they would disagree. If you are interested in structures in human languages, a good place to start is with any of Chomsky's linguistics work, because he studied how words combine into phrases and phrases into sentences (think of it as a tree). In fact, every sentence in every human language is formed from a noun phrase, auxillory, and a verb phrase. It is kind of similar to token types combining to form sucessivly "larger" constructions in a computer language, but it is more easily recognizible because a) computer langauges barely have any transformational rules b) have a very limited non-user defined vocabulary.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Google doesn't spam its own listings in return for ad bucks. They do occasionally throw in a "Sponsored Link" but those are always color-coded and usually off to the side of the main list.
What your parent is saying, and I can echo their sentiments, is that there are a million and one crap sites that are keyword-spamming the crawlers. Some really sell the product in question, but most seem to be stealing the review copy from other sites - I saw the exact same listing for a scrolly-mouse on 4 different sites, and none actually sold it.
Google has done an admirable job of staying above the corruption of ad revenue and sponsor pressure. Searching is usually effortless if you can be a little specific.
No, Google is not perfect and sometimes searching can be frustrating, especially when the keywords are necessarily common - "Help" and "Linux" come to mind. But I usually get useful info.
And Google Cache is your friend at work!
GTRacer
- Time to ego-surf!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
It would be nice if there is a feature that filters e-store entries. For example, I was looking for a solution to my Logitech RumblePad left analog stick problem. And no matter how refined my search is, I still get thousands of pages to stores selling that gamepad. I don't want to buy a gamepad. But I guess search engines and e-commerce would never be separated. Sadly this is how the Internet works now.
Anything 3d will immediately slow down your interaction to a snails pace as you manipulate your environment. Even if it was a virtual mind-meld into a matrix like environment... "walking" to your search result and activating would take longer than a quick scroll down a result list with text blurbs.
Intuitive does not mean good.
It should be efficient, and become good through acclimation. Just like riding a bicycle. It seems garish at first, but it makes perfect sense later on.
Just look at the interface from Minority Report. We should all be so lucky to have UIs like that. The answer is big screens, "front page snippets" representation of documents/results for at a glance viewing, and multidimensional arrangement where dimension (and tagging) is based on attributes (relevance, date, accuracy). Dimension could mean position in space or in a hierachy, etc.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
They're still a software firm. Did you interview with Tim Bray of XML fame, perhaps? The web demo I saw way back when used ODP data and a lot of Java.
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
If you're up for some maths and some fairly dry reading, check out the paper "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment" by Jon Kleinberg. He describes a search method which takes regular text-based search results and then examines the link structure around those pages. The idea is that pages of comparable content exhibit heavy interlinking. Clusters of such pages can be identified with a recursive algorithm a little like Google's PageRank, and then distinguished with some nifty eigenvector mathematics. This gives you your basic categories, based solely on the link structure.
While the paper doesn't detail how one might label the categories identified, I don't imagine that it's all that difficult to do with some simple correlation algorithms, which wouldn't be language-dependent.
Disclaimer: since vivisimo is down and I've not used it, I could well be talking out of my arse here; this is just one categorisation method with which I'm familiar, and would produce the results mentioned. It may not be how vivisimo actually do it.
Detecting infinite loops?!?! If you can figure out a way to do that, then you'll have solved the halting problem and disproved the incompleteness theorem.
Of course you'll have also unravled the fabric of the universe...
Kartoo is a frenchie search engine is kinda different. You sorta need high bandwidth cuz
it uses flash.
http://www.kartoo.com/
link to it here
I still miss the original Alta Vista.
And what, if not /.ing, did *you* try to do?
The only one that got processed was "Slashdot Effect".
Yes, there is glut and yes there are blog-holes.
The thing I have noticed to be the greatest single limit on web searching is the operator. I can regularly find things on the net that my co-workers cannot. This is because I understand keyword boolean searching at a deeper level than most people.
I blame this on the level of education of the common population, as opposed to being evidence of my own superiority. 8-)
In a world where most people have never actually met or "dealt with" a librarian (archivist, whatever 8-) it should surprise nobody that these self-same people have no idea what it means to take personal responsibility for organizing their own approach to knowing things.
Having grown up near and actually talked to librarians all my life I actually understand how to group information. Applying that knowledge to a search for some words and against others isn't that far a stretch.
It is a personal pet peve of mine to have to listen to people bemoan Google (etc.) when these self-same people have never even *noticed* the advanced search link, nor even learned the power of the minus ("-") in the standard search bar.
There is no technology that can "fix" bad user inquiries that won't in turn "ruin" good ones.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Heck, just searching for "paris hilton" brought up some information on the hotel in about the 6th link down. Given that the default is 10 on the front page, I don't see much of a problem even without the extra modifiers (aside from the lack of video previews in the other links returned)...
searching for Paris Hilton the socialite and her "exploits".... that darn thing keeps showing the hilton hotel in Paris where Paris Hilton never partied....
Grokker has several major downsides as compared with Google right now:
* It's a program, not a web page.
* It only runs on Windows and MacOS X. (More generally: it cares what kind of system it runs on, which Google doesn't.)
* It uses Java.
Basically, it's a step in the wrong direction from Google. Google's homepage is the model of simplicity: no ads, no extraneous information, nothing that isn't specifically focused on getting you the search results you want. Google's search results are clear, unbiased, seperate out and clearly label the advertisements, and have just the right amount of Do What I Mean. If Google came out with a version of this, it would just be a set of unobtrusive text links at the top and/or bottom of the page saying "Did you mean: 'Paris Hilton person' or 'Paris Hilton hotel'."
The other reason you don't want a seperate client is because when you get the results, you will want to open them in a web browser. So why not use a web browser to find them in the first place. The only thing that might make sense is a browser plugin. Grokker also has a plugin, but it is proprietary, requires Java (which is also proprietary), and only works on Internet Explorer for Windows or Safari for MacOS X
If Grokker wants to succeed, they need to realize two simple things:
* They should provide a service, not a piece of proprietary software. Provide a Free Software plugin or provide the information to someone who can.
* Text, text, text. Other than the Google logo, there are no images on Google's front page (which I rarely visit thanks to Mozilla's ability to search from the address bar) or their search results. Grokker's results are entirely image-based.
This is very difficult to do. Most keyword-based search systems use an inverted index for searches.
The first step involves a hash table that converts keywords into term-ids. Then the inverted index is used: it is a table that holds, for each term-id, a sorted list of document-ids that contain the term. The search process is almost instantaneous, as it only involves operations on sorted lists.
To use regexps, the search engine must convert the regexp into a series of words that match the regexp (a very large set - potentially infinite) and then look them all in the inverted index. This is very slow and, as most users never use the advanced search function, very unlikely to be added to popular search engines until some competitive data structure is discovered.
Google has, among others, a very nice linux filter all ready.
My only issue with Google is that it has a mildly annoying problem with linking to other search engines. Say, for instance, you search for n. Sometimes, instead of being presented with a list of sites carrying information about n, you're presented with links to other (mostly horrible) search engines. It's just as bad as being served a list of pages that are nothing more than "Google magnets," filled with a bunch of terms close to the topic you searched for, but missing any real content.
That's Google's largest flaw, IMHO.
(1) Subscription Model - Make submissions for website links only accepted after review by human beings. You could then charge the 'searcher' a monthly or yearly subscription fee to access this service. I would definitely pay $5 a month to get a 'filtered' search engine.
(2) Community Ranked and Moderated Model - An open-source, community driven and moderated search engine that relied on the massive amount of visitors to comment and rank pages they have received via the search engine result page. A simple plug-in for IE or Netscape, etc., could allow the user to simply click on a scale of 1-5 how useful the site was. Obviously this would be biased against brand-new data, but this is a problem with a subscription service as well. With such a large number of users, this free, community moderation model would be hard to defeat, especially with IP tracking and the ability to constantly change the code in the moderation code.
The term "Slashdot Effect" is now one of only three clickable (i.e. searchable) links under their search box, suggesting that these folks at least have a sense of humour. Brownie points for that.
From my own experience with developing search technologies for an e-content site, these guys are on the right track. Compared to a lot of search technologies out there, Google is dumb. But it is blazing fast, general purpose, and smarter than most of its (former) compettitors. Part of why it is dumb is that it is so general purpose. To make a search engine smarter, you have to add context. Specialized search engines can do this by standardizing their inputs. Google could do this too, but it would require complex parsing of everything that it spiders.
Another thing that Google really lacks is detection of duplicates. Google tries to do this, but does it poorly. I remember recently doing a search on Google for an obscure DB2 error code, and getting the same page out of the IBM manual over and over again, all on different college websites.
This is another area where linguistic/statistical analysis could really help. Most knowledge-base products offer a "More Like This" feature that is an index of linguistic similarities between items. An easy way to detect duplicates with such a system is to have a fine scale and place an uppler limit on similarities, i.e. any two items with a similarity > N are likely to be duplicates.
All of this being said, I would be surprised if Google does not address these issues in the very near future. I do not think they have gone down the path that many large companies go down where they stop trying to innovate and instead just try to protect their turf.
Here's the Google Cache of Vivisimo.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
When I'm feeling peckish, I like to use Kartoo It searches for items in an interesting way.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
In fact, every sentence in every human language is formed from a noun phrase, auxillory, and a verb phrase
Come now.
This is the problem with Chomsky and his linguistics really. Looking at English and believing that all languages are fundamentally alike and that there is a simple structure to be found.
Chomskyan linguistics is in many ways like looking at C and saying: 'Oh! All programming languages must be procedural and have pointers and use curly brackets to delimit blocks! And because it is obvious how all programming languages must be inherently equivalent this must _actually_ be how every other programming language works, everything else is convoluted C! And anyway, I can't be bothered to learn Haskell. Or Prolog.'
Yes, I'm being unnecessarily flamebaitish.
I would prefer as an alternative to regexp (since that obviously would be way too much power and too many exploits) is simple logic operators.
Most search engines now have AND and OR but none have nested logic or short hand
for example I would love to do this in google: (linux && modems) || ("AT commands" && !windows)
> SELECT * FROM brain_cells WHERE synaptic_rate > 0
0 row returned
Yes, I'm sure Google is just going to roll over and give SCO whatever they want, and not fight them or anything... It will be a cold day in hell before SCO gets ANY licensing fees from Google.
You're thinking like a linux user, and not the average user.
Honestly, you *must* have had some time in your life you're trying to find out something on the web and Google hasn't been able to easily find it. Another post used the example of the "red haired singer" which is a good one. If a search engine sorted all the websites into "CD Sales" "Performances" and "Tom Malone the Construction Worker" for that person, it'd certainly point them in the right direction.
Your response doesn't apply to most people. People don't want to learn how to work technology, they want technology to "just work" for them.
Remember Altavista? It used to be "the" hot search engine. So did Lycos before that. The only reason Google seems bigger is that the audience is bigger. Search is such an integral part of peoples net experience that a new engine has the potential to rice to the top VERY quickly if the competitors don't manage to copy it and do what it does better almost instantly.
Altavista has always had the capability to specify that separate search items exist together in a document ("AND"), but that they occur in close proximity.
I can say:
"Knoppix distro" review
to Google, and I get results related to Knoppix, some of them indeed reviews OF Knoppix. I also, however, get useless hits that may mention Knoppix, but review something else further down in the document. I do not get hits restricted to Koppix reviews.
If I do this with Altavista, I get hits much closer to what I want:
"Knoppix distro" NEAR review
as a law student, I've been doing a lot of searches on westlaw and lexis. Some of the handiest search improvements over basic google:
/s word2 - search for word1 and word2 in the same sentence /p word2 - search for word1 and word2 in the same paragraph /4 word2 - search for word1 and word2 within 4 words of each other
word1
word1
word1
word can be replaced with quoted strings. It's amazing how this will enable one to focus a complex search. Moreover, it's simple, easy to understand, and relatively simple computationally.
A colleague just asked me a technical question. He said he'd normally look it up on google, but figured it would be faster to ask me.
There's probably a moral there, somewhere.
...laura
Recently, I've noticed a trend in 'landing' pages dominating the results, the kind that the search engine optimizers have been saying get you to the top of the engines. Experts have been saying that those don't work on Google, but over the last couple of months they *have* been working apparently. For instance, do a search for "80/20 mortgage". The first 6 results are all clearly the same search engine "bait" and Google appears to have taken it, hook, line and sinker. None of those pages are real content and none of them are either explanations of what an 80/20 mortgage is or even companies offering 80/20 mortgages.
I used this as an example, both because I already was looking for one and because it's a pretty non-geeky kind of thing to search for, rather than looking at results for Linux and complaining about MS entries.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Amen to using Google catch at work. Really helps to evade your companies firewall. They can't block goggle from the company firewall where I work. There would be a lot of people lost at work without goggle.
Firstly, the languages in question are called Inuktikut and Inuptiaq. Inuit is the name that the people who speak those languages call themselves. Secondly, they do have noun phrases and verb phrases, just like other languages. However, these languages also demonstrate much more bound morphology than english, so there isn't as much of a need for combinational rules and transformations to denote mood, tense, or even action. Just because inuktikut isn't as "space delimited" as English is, doesn't mean it has different units of meaning. After all, can you say that French has no past tense because you have to conjugate verbs to indicate it? You would be on better ground if Chomky were the only one advancing this kind of theory, but it is one of the best supported ones in linguistics.
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Crudely Drawn Games
What I see in the replies is that the majority says that Google is good enough and that they do not need anything els/better/different. To me these are exactly the 'arguments' I hear when I tell people to switch over to Linux.
I do like that there are still different possabilaties. I would hate to see Google become the one and only searchengine, just as I hate Windows becoming the one and only OS or RedHat becoming the one and only Linux.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
and if they *don't* have lots of good lawyers, presumably they could *find them very quickly*