> [...] 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.)
I'm not sure how fair it is to speak of people submitting search requests as Google's (and other similar organizations') "user base". This implies that the primary purpose is to serve those people, which hasn't been true for a long time. The actual situation is that people performing searches are the product and the advertisers are the customers; the search results are just the coin in which the searchers are paid for being part of the product. > 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. I see no reason to think they'd care, and reason to think they wouldn't. Some years ago I had occasion to look for a music typesetting system called "SMUT". I'm sure you can imagine the false positives. When I found they persisted even when I added supposedly-exclusionary terms to the search like "-sex -pussy", I wrote to them about this. Did they fix their exclusionary syntax to work, to not return results I specifically indicated I didn't want? No; they added "typesetting" to a list of search terms which prevented their engine from returning that clutter. IOW, even an explicit indication that you don't want certain results is not enough to stop them from returning them. They clearly don't care what searchers anti-want; I see no reason to think they'd care what searchers _do_ want. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ 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.
