The Internet - drowning in its own waste?

[Kylearan]

Hi,

first, please correct me if I'm wrong, but brackets in search queries don't do anything in Google.

Another factor rarely mentioned is the way the search engines have evolved, and are evolving, the ammount of control the user has over the search.

I wish I could agree, but I'm afraid just the opposite is the case. I don't know for how long you know about and use Google, but I remember the time Google was released to the public, along with several papers describing the internal architecture of the whole system and the PageRank algorithm, which is the main reason for Google being so popular (besides being fast and not diluting the results with paid-for advertisement) because it did a great job on sorting the results. Anyway, back then Google (like most other search engines) allowed AND, OR, +, -, () and wildcards in search queries, along with the options to find words in URLs etc as they do now. The users were able to specify exactly what to search for, they had complete control and a powerful query language. It was paradise.

Then, a time came when search engine companies found out that more and more "normal", aka non-geek, people started to use the net, and that the majority of these people were confused with all the options and did not know what to do with all the operators, let alone how wildcards work, and that these people actually were scared away from search engine sites which offered these. So search engines like AltaVista started to hide these options behind small "advanced search" links, and stopped to list all query options, in order to attract more people - but at least they still offered these now-hidden options.

Then, one day, I was suddenly thrown out of paradise: Google stopped supporting wildcards, OR, and structuring queries with brackets (OR found its way back in eventually). Instead, they introduced stemming and synonyms as replacements for the stupid. Argh! While I see the usefulness of stemming, why on earth have they cut the powerful tools I used every day, especially wildcards?!? I guess they did it to increase server-side performance, but Google lost a lof of appeal for me that day. I sent several mails to them asking for a reason and complaining, but never got an answer back.

So while you're right that most people don't know how to refine their search in Google, there are still people out there who know how they could refine their search even more if Google still allowed it, and the amount of control the user has over the search in Google has decreased actually. There are still a lot of search engines out there allowing the full set of query options, yes, but compared to Google's (now surely enhanced) PageRank algorithm, they lack in the way results are sorted for relevancy, so they are no real competition. If anybody knows about a search engine using a similar algorithm to sort results which also offers the full set of query options, I'd be a very happy man!

-Kylearan