On 9/13/07, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > begin quoting Bob La Quey as of Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 07:58:25PM -0700: > > On 9/13/07, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > begin quoting Tracy R Reed as of Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 05:07:16PM -0700: > > > [snip] > > > > On the contrary I still find that google can find what I need very > > > > quickly and I use it several times every day. The usefulness of google > > > > seems unchanged to me. > > > > > > Google is turning into my preferred index into wikipedia. Google is > > > pretty fast at finding wikipedia pages... > > > > Take a look at Googlepedia. It replaces the adds with > > the Wikipedia page corresponding to the search term. I am > > using it experimentally but so far I like it. > > > > https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=googlepedia&status=4 > > I'll do that when I get a stable version of Firefox up. Thanks. > > > > For finding actual useful (non-wikipedia) content, it may be better than > > > most of the other search engines, but most of my queries do not return > > > satisfactory answers. "Google is the best" is faint praise. > > > > "It is a poor workman blame his tools." as mom used to say. > > Y'know, I hate that aphorism, it's insulting and condescending. A good > workman uses good tools, after all, and will not put up with poor tools. > He'll throw 'em away.
OK. So create a better search engine. I am sure the folks over at Lucerne would love to have insighful help. http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html Actually this does point toward the Meta Problem. In almost any direction one cares to look computing is one giant hodgepodge. There are so many snarls and competing confusions it seems at times a waste of effort to even target anyone small area for ones effort. Sometimes I do feel it is time to start the entire enterprise of computing and communication all over again. I know of at least a couple of fellows with this insane vision and with at least moderately interesting ideas for what an alternative system would be. One starts with alternative Occam like hardware and proceeds to build provable systems on top of it. The other really out there fellow starts with semiotics and wants to use it to decompose everything into natural primitives. The chances either of them will get far are somewhere between slim and zero. Meanwhile we muddle along with less than perfect tools, blaming them if we must, but rarely throwing them away. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
