Frustrated Webmasters and Google searches

While reading through some Google Sitemap information I came across this post and the following quote: "I've been a huge fan of Google since it's inception because it was Linux based and thorough. How much of the web have I missed out on by exclusively using Google? I guess I just have to accept that Yahoo is a superior search engine at this point. BUMMER! "

I couldn't agree more. If you really, really need to know something... use Yahoo! Google's results might be "better" in the sense they have less junk or SPAM postings or whatever... but you could be "better" too if you screened out most of what's out there.

Maybe we need to return to the days of Metacrawler, where you have a "meta search engine" that crawls the other search engines. I think Rob mentioned one that's newer, which turned up a Twilight Zone episode I was looking for. Maybe there are others out there as well?

BTW, I know the Google AdSense crawlers hit this blog just fine, because they find really weird things to reference in ads. (Say that something is "the best thing since sliced bread", and you'll start getting bread ads. I'm serious. Look around on here!) But it seems their "public results" are way different from their "AdSense results". Now, having private searches makes sense for things that you can't completely identify -- OCR on patents, voice recognition on podcasts, etc. But, hey, text is text -- if you're crawling it, then serve the results, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Passing on Panel Discussions?

In his latest podcast ( Blogarithms IT Conversations News: August 14, 2005 ), Doug Kaye mentioned an interesting anecdotal tidbit: People seem less interested in panel discussions at conferences than they do in single speakers. The panel discussions get lower ratings at ITConversations.com, and... there was some other reason he mentioned it, too. (Okay, so I don't remember. Sorry!) As I was listening to one of their panel discussions this morning, I had a thought: It was really hard to follow. It takes a lot of mental energy to keep up with who's-saying-what. And I don't even particular care about the who's-who; it would be even worse if I really need to know which person was making a particular point. Could that be what people are reacting to when they rate panel discussions lower than single-speaker talks?
Read more

Commercial comments (Blogging from Word!)

Ironically, I’ve got two commercial-related things going on in my mind right now. On the Ericast, I’ve been discussing how commercials are going to get more and more imbedded into content; I think we’re going to drift away from “spot radio” or “spot television”, and even drift away from traditional “product placement”, and move toward a picture-in-picture or screen crawl or other “embedded advertising”.  That way, you’ll be unable to avoid the advertisement… and you’ll want to see it, because skipping it would mean that you’d miss out on the content.  (Imagine, for example, a HGTV demo on sponge-painting that takes up the top 2/3rds of the screen, with the bottom 1/3rd showing things like “BEHR Paint on sale at Home Depot!  20% off!”.) I might hate living in a world filled with television that looks like that… but it probably would be effective. But, speaking of, I’ve found a program that removes commercials from MPG files!  And it really works!  I’ll blog it next, from the site. Why n
Read more
USATODAY.com - Schoolyard bullies get nastier online / Ick. Ick, ick, ick. Glad to know that technology is making parenting oh-so-much simpler, right?
Read more