Where are the thoughtful comments of old?

Added some more to it.rnrnIts unlikely Google will ever find another money machine as efficient as search advertising, which accounts for about 40% of the $40 billion advertising dollars spent online each year. But that doesnt mean they arent going to …

I agree that the page isn’t ‘pretty’, but it IS functional; I think the fact that all other search engines have aped Google’s results page says a lot about what works for most users. Besides, what are the alternatives?!

Google’s organization of the world’s information has to evolve from 1D-lists to the presentation of information using 2D-lists (flat outlinessuch as in http://www.clusty.com) and finally, to 3D-lists (semantic storyboards). While Google Search probably presents the most ‘relevant’ results for a search query, there is a large room for improvement in the organization of results especially for text. Until Google Search evolves to visually presenting search results so that a user can easily access related results for each item, I’d say that Google is not effectively organizing the world’s information. Efficient Google may be in the organization of search results, but effective it is arguably not.

I look forward to the day when Google Search is semantically and visually presenting search results, for instance, using 3D lists. How much more fun search, discovery, and organization of information would be on the Internet!

Best,
Rod King.

http://search.galaxyit.com

http://projects...yboard.ning.com

And to all the people who say “algorithmic search is 90% solved”…have any of you used Google? Ever?

Try putting quotations around all 3 words that *must* be in your results in order for you to find what you need. (I did this last night- hours of fun.)

If your search terms even begin to flirt with the long-tail you are SOL. Google will still give you three gazillion billion results, but those results will be for terms they literally pulled out of their algorithm’s ass, that have absolutely *nothing* to do with what you actually searched for, that contain *none* of the words in your search string.

Then jump over to Google Blog Search and watch the results further deteriorate…right into spam on Blogspot and malicious redirects, for the most part.

I’m sorry, but algorithmic search isn’t even 50-60% solved…not on Google. It could be at or close to 100% solved – the brainpower to control the algorithms is there – but Google’s desire for ad money makes them dishonor the purity of the algorithmic answer in favor of nonsense (or even harmful) results meant to keep you on the page looking for what you need (which you’ll never find) until you click on a goddamned ad already.

Thanks to CustomizeGoogle and AdBlock Plus, of course, I will never see an ad, much less click on one. I only wish everyone else could say the same.