Alternative Search Engines: The Gray Lady Way
June 29, 2015
I read “Alternative Search Engines.” (Note: If you have to pay to read the article, visit a library and look for the story in the New York Times Magazine.) The process was painful. Distinctions which I find important were not part of the write up. The notion that some outfits actually index Web sites, and other outfits use Bing and Google search results without telling the user or the New York Times this cost cutting, half measure. Well, who cares? I don’t.
The write up asserts:
I was investigating the more practical, or just more traditional, alternatives to Google: Bing (owned by Microsoft), Yahoo (operated by Google back then and by Bing now), Info.com (an aggregator of Yahoo/Bing, Google and others) and newer sites like DuckDuckGo and IxQuick (which don’t track your search history), Gibiru and Unbubble (which don’t censor results) and Wolfram Alpha (which curates results). They were all too organized, too logical — the results were all the same, with only slight differences in the order of their presentation. It seemed to me that the Search Engine of Tomorow couldn’t be concerned with the best way to find what users were searching for, but with the best way to find what users didn’t even know they were searching for.
In case the Gray Lady has not figured out the real world, tomorrow means mobile devices. Mobile devices deliver filtered, personalized, swizzled for advertisers results. If you expect to run key word queries on the next iPhone or Android device, give that a whirl and let me know how that works out for you.
The crisis in search is that content is not available. Obtaining primary and certain secondary information is time consuming, difficult, and tedious. The reality of alternative search engines is that these are few and far between.
Do you trust Yandex.com or Yandex.ru? Do you know what the size of the Exalead search index is? What’s included and what’s omitted from Qwant, the search engine based on Pertimm (who?) which allegedly causes Eric Schmidt to suffer Qwant induced insomnia?
Nah. In Beyond Search, our view has been that the old fashioned, library type of research is a gone goose. The even older fashioned “talk to humans” and “do original research which conforms to the minimal guidelines reviewed in Statistics 101 classes” is just too Baby Boomerish.
With the Gray Lady explaining search, the demise of precision and recall, relevancy, editorial policies for inclusion in an index, and latency between information being available and inclusion in an index is history.
Stephen E Arnold, June 29, 2015
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
