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. :(

Re:What we need is whitelisting

[vbdrummer0]

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

I agree, but why not just eliminate all ads from search results? As far as I'm concerned, they can put real ads all over the result page as long as the results themselves are legit.

Re:What we need is whitelisting

[eln]

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.

Re:What we need is whitelisting

[iminplaya]

This is kinda close.

Music Search

[fembots]

a user can record a query by playing notes on the system's virtual keyboard. Or he or she can hum the song into a computer microphone.

I tried that, but I was so out-of-tune the search engine returned all songs from Britney Spears.

Re:Music Search

[k4_pacific]

I tried it too, but all the results were blocked for DMCA violations.

What I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Is just some better work done on recognizing essentially similar documents. Like, if I perform a search, and 40% of the returns are the same wikipedia article copied to different sites, it would be nice if the search engine could only show me one (wikipedia). Or, like, if I'm searching for some kind of error I got while using Linux. Most of the returns I get will be various old Linux mailing lists, but only some of them will be relevant to my problem. There must be some way the search engine could logically organize them for me so that I could more clearly identify that block of returns that is most applicable to my problem of the moment.

Re:What I want

[me at werk]

CopyScape can do the recognizing of copied stuff, but it's purpose is only finding website plagarism. This, however, would definately find all the wikipedia forks unless it's a really old copy and the page has had a major rewrite.

If google could integrate copyscape into their search, you would be happy.

Re:What I want

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want is a button that lets me resrtict my search for a thing to either a review of the thing, a forum/blog discussing the thing, places to buy the thing, or specs/datasheets on the thing. So many times I type in a product name only to get two dozen "find prices/read reviews on X" -- none of which actually have reviews ("be the first to review X!") or even more than a couple of not-so-great prices. A filter could be done by creating a statistical fingerprint of the page.

I also want to be able to sort my search based on the amount of grammatically correct (or mostly correct) text on the page. Something would have to keep it from indexing hidden (white on white) words or keywords designed to grab top spots on search engines. There would have to be some more complex grammar checker (and place checker to make sure it isn't a bunch of tiny text at the bottom of the page) to accomplish this.

It's not cuz you were out of tune

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because all pop music sounds exactly the same these days. From the perspective of a search engine, it *IS* all just songs from Britney Spears.

Clusty = Innovative

[int2str]

Asides from the horrible name, clusty (a clustering search engine) is very innovative and easy to use. I hope more search engines will adapt similar technology soon.

Link to clusty.com search engine

Re:Clusty = Innovative

[lucabrasi999]

Use vivisimo instead of clusty. It is the same search engine/company, just different names. If you search use Vivisimo, the sponsored links aren't quite as obnoxious. Unfortunately, the firefox extension uses Clusty, not Vivisimo.

As for the names, both of the suck big-time. "Vivisimo" and "Clusty". Geez. I remember a few years ago, Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting decided to change their name to "Monday". I wonder if the folks at Vivisimo hired anyone from PWCC, because their names suck almost as much.

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.

Re:Better Search techniques

[rueger]

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.

It's available!

[ByteMangler_242]

You can do this in google: searchterm1 searchterm2 ~bogus The tilde will look for synonyms. You can see which ones hit back by reading the bold results which are neither searchterm1 or searchterm2. I use ~howto and ~cheats often.

Easy (relatively) improvement...

[Nobody You Know]

The number one search engine feature that would make my life infinitely easier would be precise proximity operators in search engine syntax.

(For those who don't have a clue what I'm talking about, LEXIS-NEXIS, among others, allows you to run searches like foo w/5 bar (the word "foo" within 5 words of the word "bar"), or even foo pre/5 bar (the word "foo", followed, within five words, by the word "bar". Good proximity engines allow you to search not only within x words, but also to order terms, to specify root words within terms, etc.)

It would be great to have people reviewing and whitelisting page results, but that takes human interaction. Implementing precise proximity operators, though, can give you nearly the same benefits without any of the human cost.

Many people here have suggested eliminating ad text from search results, but if history is any indication, any algorithmic system that we can come up with to do so will be circumvented pretty quickly. The one way to fix this is to allow me to say that I want the word "modperl" within 10 words of "solaris", rather that just specify any page that contains both terms. That will get rid of 95+% of ads right away.

Surely, with all the bright people at Google, this is something that they can figure out pretty easily.