Highway Hypnosis on your Monitor

I've received a lot of good advice on how to make my search engine simple and easy to use. In fact, in a few short days you will see for yourself. But before you see that, I want you to think about something involving searching for things.

If you use Google (and you know you do), you know the routine you follow. Here is what I do:

First, I try to phrase my request so I don't get too many sponsored links.

Second, I have one finger on the control key (IE User) so my results always appear in a new tab on the browser. I just love when I go to a site that won't let me go back to where I was. That should be a hanging offense.

Third, I look at the "Did you mean...." message which tells me the search engine doesn't believe what I asked was valid.

Fourth, I never click on "I feel lucky".

Fifth, I repeat this process many times starting at step one because I have to trick the search engine into returning meaningful results instead of what a whole bunch of SEO activists have pickled the search engine into returning.

So what is the upshot of this flowchart? The seemingly "simple" interface of Google hides the exercises you have to go through in order to get good results. This never happens on the first try. And it is not Google's fault. They all do it. Until every web site is marked up with a valid, authoritative ontology (look that up on Google), we will never escape the search trickster merry-go-round.

I think the only way around this problem is to have a search engine which cannot be scammed, slammed or flammed into returning ten pages of the same web site for any related term you type in. I've been dreaming of this since I thought up FindItByMe.com. Local search is not local search unless everything in an area is listed. And you can't rely on the businesses in that area to all self-report their correct information. Someone has to do it.

There simply is no way around this. Any commercial directory will always be 30% wrong on average, according to each informal test I've run. So now the search engine providers have done their duty: you still use their services, but you don't take the results too seriously at the same time. It's a good thing we don't pick surgeons that way.

I challenge anyone to really count the number of times they have to refine searches and filter out nonesense results. I really want to get you to where you want to go or find what you want to find in as few steps as possible. So let me know if you agree that search should be more meaningful to what you asked for. I'm really curious what you think.