Search engines don't literally break down, leaving you with a sad error message: Sorry, but I can't take the stress of searching billions of pages any more, I'm staying home today. It would be better, more honest, though, if they did just that!

According to two major search engine surveys by Mondosoft and Infonic, crap, inadequate, inaccurate and bogus search results turn up between 60 and 74% of the time.


I think that rather than blame Google and all the rest for the failure of a search engine to deliver the correct goods, the blame should lie with providers of content. Bottom line, Goooooooogle have the brightest stars on earth programing the robots, but unless all our articles are titled, tagged and optimised for the robots, how can we expect the bots to index articles correctly?

Too often, indexed info is a cluster, and imperfect humans searching for imperfect info equates to a match made in search hell. Unless you already know the answer, the odds are that you won't get a comprehensive set of results.

Miserable failure

If I were into job security, I would want to be reincarnated as a search engine. A job for life, and paid gobs of money for referrals, regardless of how far short you fall of the mark. What is not to like about that? Any human operating consistently at a 60-74% level of ineptitude, would be out of a job, much less earn a lot of commission for a job badly done.

(I talk idealistically, however, and in fact, I don't need to die first and come back later in order to make my dream work gig come true. The evidence suggests that anyone who works for the government can operate as a miserable failure with impunity!

At least I tried, is a catch phrase uttered frequently by inept government officials still in a job!)


Talking of failing, do you know the number one answer to the search query "miserable failure"?

Not George Bush's autobiography any more, but an article by a search engine forum, discussing the embarrassing state of affairs when George Bush's autobiography did appear top of the search results for miserable failure. It was the work of Google bombers, a concerted effort to generate enough links to hit the top of the search engine results.

Good ole Google, politically unbiased, defused the Google Bomb and terminated a link from the top search result to the White House.

Judging by the fact that I am now aware of this recent history for the first time, it sounds like this was a bomb that was diffused, but is still ticking away. What an oxymoron!

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