48 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
1.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2013-07-02T07:26:39.000Z'
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title: Yes, there is a better search engine (1998)
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url: http://www.salon.com/1998/12/21/straight_44/
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author: bobsil1
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points: 47
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 15
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1372749999
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_bobsil1
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- story_5976316
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objectID: '5976316'
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year: 1998
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---
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I'm not an Internet investor myself, and I don't care much whether Wall
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Street's love affair with portals is consummated in a bath of riches or
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sours in some imminent bubble-bursting market correction. But I am an
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Internet user. And I resent that today's portals are so obsessed with
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fine-tuning their demographics and matching every dubious feature their
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competitors offer that they are doing virtually nothing to improve the
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service at the heart of all their businesses: helping us all find stuff
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on the Web.
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Most of the portals have the eyeballs -- the site traffic -- that make
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them potentially successful businesses because they started as search
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engines. But in the three years or so of the commercial Web's evolution,
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during which the number of indexable Web pages has mushroomed, these
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search engines have made only the smallest improvements to their
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technology.
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When you conduct a general search on a broad term like, say, "President
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Clinton," you never know whether you'll actually find the White House
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Web site -- or some homely page chronicling an eighth-grade class trip
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to D.C. (Infoseek does a decent job returning the Oval Office site at
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the top of the list, but Excite sends you to an impeachment poll on
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Tripod and the Paula Jones Legal Defense Fund -- the president's page
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doesn't even make it into the first 10 results. Hotbot's top result is a
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site called Tempting Teens -- "All the Kinky Things that make our
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Government what it is.")
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