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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."

4 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. :(

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    Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
    1. 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.

  2. 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.

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    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