---
created_at: '2013-07-02T07:26:39.000Z'
title: Yes, there is a better search engine (1998)
url: http://www.salon.com/1998/12/21/straight_44/
author: bobsil1
points: 47
story_text: ''
comment_text: 
num_comments: 15
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1372749999
_tags:
- story
- author_bobsil1
- story_5976316
objectID: '5976316'

---
I'm not an Internet investor myself, and I don't care much whether Wall
Street's love affair with portals is consummated in a bath of riches or
sours in some imminent bubble-bursting market correction. But I am an
Internet user. And I resent that today's portals are so obsessed with
fine-tuning their demographics and matching every dubious feature their
competitors offer that they are doing virtually nothing to improve the
service at the heart of all their businesses: helping us all find stuff
on the Web.

Most of the portals have the eyeballs -- the site traffic -- that make
them potentially successful businesses because they started as search
engines. But in the three years or so of the commercial Web's evolution,
during which the number of indexable Web pages has mushroomed, these
search engines have made only the smallest improvements to their
technology.

When you conduct a general search on a broad term like, say, "President
Clinton," you never know whether you'll actually find the White House
Web site -- or some homely page chronicling an eighth-grade class trip
to D.C. (Infoseek does a decent job returning the Oval Office site at
the top of the list, but Excite sends you to an impeachment poll on
Tripod and the Paula Jones Legal Defense Fund -- the president's page
doesn't even make it into the first 10 results. Hotbot's top result is a
site called Tempting Teens -- "All the Kinky Things that make our
Government what it is.")
