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Better Search Engines

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the finding-nemo dept.

prostoalex writes "Scientific American is seeking better Web searches. They report on all sorts of innovations happening outside the Google-Yahoo-MSN zone that the press is usually reporting on, including GPS-enhanced searches from University of Maryland, Shape Retrieval and Analysis from Princeton, musical search engine from New Zealand Digital Library Project, and some of the projects that A9 and Ask.com have been working on."

11 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. What we need is whitelisting by Jailbrekr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If we can whitelist sites, and reduce the total number of advertisments cluttering the search, the existing search algorithms would work quite nicely.

    It is a pipe dream, I know. :(

    --
    Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
    1. Re:What we need is whitelisting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      lol, what? Seriously? Whitelist the web? Huh? Come again? What?

    2. Re:What we need is whitelisting by prostoalex · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Theoretically Google should be able to put that into their toolbar. Also you could probably use an extension in Firefox that would modify your query to exclude certain sites. After the list gets long, however, it wouldn't be too effective.

    3. Re:What we need is whitelisting by eln · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Kind of like a directory of sites like, say, Yahoo was in the 90's.

      The problem with whitelisting is that a spider-driven site like Google will always end up having a greater quantity of relevant results (as well as a greater quantity of non-relevant results, of course). History to this point has shown that people prefer to deal with a lot of bad results mixed in with a lot of good results rather than having to rely on a small set of "good" results from a directory-driven search engine.

    4. Re:What we need is whitelisting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ads exist just because search engines are managed by some companies that need money.

      Imagine now that the search engine is totally distributed...

  2. Need better division of info being searched. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I need a search engine that lets me search for information vs products vs forum posts vs whatever else is on the internet.

    I get frustrated when I'm trying to research a new technology and most of the search results are for commerce sites.

  3. Better Search techniques by rueger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nice article which summarized many of the problems with contemporary search engines.

    My experience is that a few years ago you could type say "baked gorgonzola" into Google and be sure to get a useful result pretty near the top. These days though what you want is likely to be on page three or four, after a dozen links to price comparison sites.

    There really is no such thing as a quick Google search any more. It almost invariably involves multiple formulations of your query, and probably trolling through at least two or three pages of results.

    Whether that's because of Google, or the sheer volume of content on the web, or sites that capitalize on Goggle's weaknesses is something I don't know.

    --
    Three Squirrels
    1. Re:Better Search techniques by rueger · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ok Bad example. Try searching Google for information on say a Sony STR-DE945 reciever and see how far you need to look to find anything beyond retail. Like maybe for a page from the Sony website?

      Or try to find a User Maunal for the same item: sony STR-DE945 receiver manual.

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      Three Squirrels
    2. Re:Better Search techniques by susano_otter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Why would you Google for the user manual, instead of just going straight to Sony's website?

      Google's rankings are based in part on what other people care about. The results you're seeing are because people are more interested in finding and using websites where they can buy the product, rather than the manufacturer's official brochure page for the product. And since that page is trivial to find, if you really do need it, it would end up being noise on most Google searches for the product.

      When I need a manual for a server in my datacenter, I don't go to Google. I go straight to the vendor's website. Works every time.

      --

      Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.

  4. Sure, sure... by susano_otter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And the moment any one of these other technologies becomes at all useful, except in certain limited applications, the technology will be acquired by one of the search engines that everybody actually cares about (coughGooglecough), and the functionality will be added to their Internet search solution.

    --

    Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.

  5. better to search information, not pages by AnonymousCactus · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Enhancements to normal search engines are great and will always be important, but better is to go beyond that to searching, indexing and retrieving actual information. Services like AskJeeves and company originally promised true question answering and other, more experimental, projects like UW's Know-It-All promise to operate over information, not webpages.

    Perhaps these are just very generalized search engine enhancement...but I think it's a new way of thinking that will become very important over the next decade as facilitating technologies mature.