Increasing the number of items that can be searched is great, but the actual searching algorithms really haven't gotten THAT much better in the past 3 years or so.
Obviously, you can't have breakthroughs every year (or maybe even every 5 years) but search as an algorithm still has much more room to improve. I'd love to see an improvement in that, as opposed to just increasing the number of pages indexed.
I'm still waiting for a context modifier for keywords, so when you type something like 'mechanics:teeth' you get all the technical matches for gears, and when you type 'medicine:teeth' you would get all the medical matches for dentistry.
Why not just search for "teeth medicine" then? Google hasn't done direct keyword matching only in years now (for example, a search for "computer" may yield results containing synonyms such as "PC" or "Mac" even if the original keyword of "computer" isn't contained at all on the site).
Remember that Yahoo started out as a category browser in its very early days, and now categories are really just another keyword. Google and all of the other search engines are designed to work well for the lowest common denominator of internet users - as someone with a 3-digit UID, I imagine you're not in that group. Trying to outsmart Google will probably just make its algorithm feel unnatural/broken.
Just use http://www.clusty.com/ [clusty.com] . The search results are just as good as google, and it generates a list of categories that you can select from.
Admittedly, "mechanical" isn't in there... The categories are quite a bit more specific, such as "baby", "shark" "wisdom", "cleaner", etc.
I'd settle for being able to do any kind of special character search using google, or any search engine, for that matter. When trying to look up programming related content, the lack of ability to search by special characters can be a real pain.
Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what
one is talking about nor whether what is said is true.
-- Russell
Cool, and definitely worthwhile, but... (Score:2)
Obviously, you can't have breakthroughs every year (or maybe even every 5 years) but search as an algorithm still has much more room to improve. I'd love to see an improvement in that, as opposed to just increasing the number of pages indexed.
Still cool though...
Re:Cool, and definitely worthwhile, but... (Score:2)
I'm still waiting for a context modifier for keywords, so when you type something like 'mechanics:teeth' you get all the technical matches for gears, and when you type 'medicine:teeth' you would get all the medical matches for dentistry.
Re:Cool, and definitely worthwhile, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just search for "teeth medicine" then? Google hasn't done direct keyword matching only in years now (for example, a search for "computer" may yield results containing synonyms such as "PC" or "Mac" even if the original keyword of "computer" isn't contained at all on the site).
Remember that Yahoo started out as a category browser in its very early days, and now categories are really just another keyword. Google and all of the other search engines are designed to work well for the lowest common denominator of internet users - as someone with a 3-digit UID, I imagine you're not in that group. Trying to outsmart Google will probably just make its algorithm feel unnatural/broken.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Just use http://www.clusty.com/ [clusty.com] . The search results are just as good as google, and it generates a list of categories that you can select from.
Admittedly, "mechanical" isn't in there... The categories are quite a bit more specific, such as "baby", "shark" "wisdom", "cleaner", etc.
Re: (Score:2)