Search Sucks: A Mini Case

June 30, 2009

I listened occasionally to the Gillmor Gang when it was available on iTunes. I noticed that the program disappeared, and I lost track of it. My RSS reader snagged a story about a verbal shoot out between the one man TV network Leo LaPorte and one of the participants in the Gilmore Gang. To make a long and somewhat confused story short, the show disappeared. I figured this would be a good topic to use to test Bing.com and Google.com. My premise was that neither service would be indexing the type of information about flaps in the wobbly world of real time content on the rich media Web.

I ran the query Gilmore Gang on Google and finally found a link to a story published on June 13, 2009, called “Hanging on for Dear Life.” The problem with the Google results was that the top rated links were just plain wrong in terms of answering my query. Granted I used a two word query and I was purposely testing the Google system to see if it was sufficiently “smart” to figure out that I wanted current and accurate information. Well, in my opinion, it was like a promising student who stayed up late and did not do his home work. Here is the result list Google generated for me on June 28, 2009:

The result I wanted I found using other tools.

What happened when I ran the query on Bing.com?

Same thing. None of the results understood the notion of context or timeliness. Here’s what Bing.com displayed.

I ran the query using a number of real time systems, which is the topic of my most recent column for Information World Review in the UK.

Several observations:

Search for the Gillmor Gang information yielded information that was to me useless, dated, and incorrect
Systems from companies did provide better information, but I had to work through mostly old, irrelevant hits to locate the answer
Heaven help the person who uses one of these mainstream services to answer mission critical queries. These systems work for celebrity deaths, but other types of information are off their radar.

In short, search sucks just as I said in my Searcher Magazine article, edited by Barbara Quint. I wrote that essay several years ago, and it is timely today.

We have a long road to travel in search and retrieval.

Stephen Arnold, July 30, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Feature, Online (general), Rich media, Search

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.