Re: Altavista better than Google for genealogy searches

Renia wrote:
> John Prentice wrote:
>> A good search engine won't just present you with 10,000 hits in random 
>> order, it will give you what it "thinks" is the best order for you. If 
>> it does it both honestly (putting the commercially-interesting ones 
>> first is what killed Altavista) and accurately, it's a far more useful 
>> engine, even if another engine gives you 12,000.
> 
> Quite. You have to know how to manipulate your search engine.

Now, I'd argue quite the opposite! A really well-designed, 
well-implemented search engine shouldn't need manipulation - it should 
give you what you need, when you want it, without having to be tweaked 
and prodded and its normal behaviour cir***vented.

Google gets some of the way there, but still needs an expert hand when 
the search gets complicated. The "advanced search" page goes some way 
towards making it usable by the non-expert user, but it's still a little 
clumsy. They've got the back-end services (spidering the web and 
storing, deconstructing and categorising the results) brilliantly right, 
but I think that they still have some way to go on the front end, where 
users are trying to put together queries without having to learn a new 
language.

John
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