29 Mar
2004
29 Mar
'04
5:38 a.m.
Google can't do case sensitive searches, as far as
I can tell, which
annoys the hell out of me. Sometimes I've needed to search for
something that's an acronym, which just happens to be a legal word
too.
I once had occasion to search for some NeXT stuff and ran into exactly
this.
I sent them mail about it. Got a boilerplate ack but nothing more.
(Not an autoack; it looked human-sent, but reeked of boilerplate.)
Similarly, Google trying to be "helpful" can
be a real pain,
I spent quite some time struggling with their "sponsored links" when I
was looking for a music typesetting engine called "smut". They appear
to believe that it's beneficial to throw up sponsored links even when
the search specifically indicates that it does not want those links.
I wrote to them about this too. Their response? Not to fix it so that
they don't return pages including terms the search specifically
indicates are to be excluded - but rather to add "typesetting" to a
list of words that (I infer) turn off "spam your results with pr0n ads"
when searching for things like "smut" that I infer are commonly
searched for by people going cruising for pr0n.
Made it _very_ clear to me that they aren't there to help people doing
searches (which I imagine is what a lot of people think); such people
are no more than eyeballs being sold to advertisers. Obvious in
retrospect....
A search engine that just returns what you ask for
from the web would
be nice - no indexing of news, mailing lists etc, no ads, and no
trying to be intelligent by stripping out words, modifying words,
randomly inserting or removing punctuation etc.
Yeah. Problem is, where do you find the philanthropist to fund the
petabytes of disk necessary and the farm of machines to search it?
Google pays for that with advertiser's dollars.
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