What is wrong with search engines?
Until they gain a certain level of intelligence (of the artificial sort, since I put little faith in the human kind), it’ll continue to be like throwing darts in the dark: you’re gonna hit something, but next time aim a little higher. And away from the crowd.
Author: Kaf Oseo
Categories: Internetology
Comments: (3) · Leave a comment · Comments RSS2 · Trackback URL
I don’t think the intelligence of the SE algorithms are the issue here, Kaf. What is the issue is the evil of page ranking. Google created pank ranking ultimately to drive their business model for revenues, and that is what is built into the AI of the search engines. Remove the ranking for dollars, and you may actually get results that are relevant.
Money makes the world go around. Google makes a lot of money. In my lifetime I doubt that I will ever see a truly altruistic search engine come into being.
@craig
You stumbled on a whipping post of mine. The goal of PageRank, whatever moralistic opinion one holds toward it, was to provide a weight to sites and pages based on links; money talks, but the revenue gains that tie to it came later (not much later, true). Since PageRank’s formula for calculating link value is based not only on amount of links but on page rank of the linkers as well, it’s little more than a popularity clique (pun intended)—the more links I gain from “respected” sources, the better my page rank, and so up goes the spiral. Which is why I chuckle whenever I see this line quoted:
When’s the last time you heard a democracy defined as 1 person = 1 vote (or 2, or maybe 3, depending on current popularity)? This crowd mentality drives the development of a lot of the web, and it’s why the idea of a “semantic web” will be drowned out by them for the foreseeable future.
It’s possible some adequately smart, entrepreneurial search engine developer will discover a good percentage of people are willing to pay a few-dozen dinero for a subscription to a semantically-astute search tool. If so, the money could be screaming then. But as I don’t bet on intelligence from nature, I won’t go broke.