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