On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 01:55:43PM -0400, [email protected] wrote: > Got anything besides Microsoft PR to back up the thesis that Bing plans to > do better at "the results you want" than other search engines?
Having done some work over the past few years with various search engines (that is: software products designed to implement search) I think it's safe to say that "the results you want" is an entirely a marketing creation. In some narrow application instances, it can be inferred via knowledge of the target audience or by the primary business use: for example, a searchable patent database could be tuned for use by lawyers. Or a repository of Unix/Linux commands for use by system administrators. And so on. But (a) there's no way to do this in general case and (b) the entire exercise is mostly ad-hockery (a definition I contributed to TNHD a couple of decades ago): that is, it's a matter of twiddling lots of knobs until something pleasing appears on the screen. (Sufficiently skilled and experienced people are *very* good at this, so I'm not denigrating the results they achieve.) A secondary problem with this is the user population, nearly all of which does not know what a Boolean query is and certainly doesn't know what more advanced query forms are -- because none of the popular web search engines, including Google, provide them. (Again, not a criticism: not much point in providing features for 0.0001% of the user base.) It's very difficult to figure out what "the results you want" are, let alone provide them, when input is just a list of words. A tertiary...ah, never mind. The bottom line is that Google seems to twiddled the knobs to settings that work reasonably well for enough people that anyone seeking to supplant them will have to twiddle their knobs sufficiently better that folks will be motivated to switch. That will not be done by the marketing department (of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, who I believe have an urgent date with a wall). ---Rsk _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
