Better Search Engines

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."

Comments

What we need is whitelisting

[Jailbrekr]

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. :(

Better Search techniques

[rueger]

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.