An 11-year old’s social studies presentation has sparked a discussion at the Digital Point search engine forums, when the girl found that Google just wasn’t good enough to help her school research.
The problem? When she searched for info on architecture and blue prints, all Google had were links to buy books and other commercial items. Of course, Yahoo had the answers for her.
So, is Google getting too overwhelmed with commercial results? Well, sometimes when I search, I feel like all everybody wants to do is sell me something. The noise is getting worse. And, for those who have trouble distinguishing between Google’s ads and organic results, it must feel even more difficult.
Yahoo seems to understand that there is a need to seperate commercial and informational results. Their Mindset service is the future of search, returning results based not just on your keyboards, but on the activity you are trying to accomplish. Its horribly useless to add “information” to the end of your search query to try to improve your results, especially since it rarely works.
Hopefully some major search engine will try to make their regular search work better for specific tasks. Otherwise, we’ll eventually start using site directories and search macros instead of web search, and 11-year old girls won’t grow up as big fans of Google as their parents.
(via SE Roundtable)
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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