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What would be your ideal search engine?

MACDRIVE

MACDRIVE

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 17, 2006
1,695
3
Clovis, California
Google is by far the most popular search engine because of its speed and huge data base, but how would you improve upon it?

What if you could create your own search engine, what would you have it do for you?
 
What if you could create your own search engine, what would you have it do for you?
Click to expand...
My laundry and dishes.

No really, google serves all my needs very well. iGoogle is nice, I like how you can customize it.
 
Off the top of my head I really can't fault Google. I love Inquisitor, and maybe a way of building that into Google would be sweet.
 
I'd want proper wildcarding. The engine tries to guess with stemming, but that's not always the right thing.
 
Although I really don't care for ask.com, I think they have a point in that Google could be improved in the extent to which it looks at phrase word coincidence. Today, you can use quotation marks to force Google to search for a phrase, but unless your quoted phrase can actually be found (which is hard, since it needs to be exact), it generates too many hits in which there are spurious associations between words that are connected conceptually. Like one of the words will appear in a link to another page on another topic (e.g. on a news or store site), etc.
 
No sponsored links.

I want an engine to return the website that most matches my search criteria to be at the top of the list, not the one who paid for the privilege.
 
I'd like one with these options:

Include results from blogs [ ]
Include results from "consumer review" sites [ ]


and you can believe me I'd leave those two unchecked most of the time...
 
context sensitive search that actually works. i heard a californian startup has a good algorithm for that. can't remember the name of the company though.

one example is searching for reviews of camera lenses (or similar gadgets) and excluding all sites that just mention the word review without actually doing one. and excluding the sites that just copy others reviews.

or in scientific searches finding a puplication that somebody actually used a chemical for a certain technology. normally you get just 5000 articels that mention the chemical and the technology. have fun reading them all........
 
i wish there was an option to take into account my browsing history in case i'm looking for a site again and can't seem to find it...
 
I would like the ability to search using more of a natural language.
So I can search for things like 'Find me two audio clips of a politician conflicting himself' (which would return many hits). Or 'find me three pictures of Niagra falls with no water going over it' Which has happened due to ice dams.
I find all search engines right now are just scratching the surface of what can be done with all the information they hold. Once you can put the pieces together you can learn a whole lot more. All the information to figure out a certain thing may already be available, but we can't search effectively enough to find it.

Just my 2 cents.
 
Heath said:
I would like the ability to search using more of a natural language.
So I can search for things like 'Find me two audio clips of a politician conflicting himself' (which would return many hits). Or 'find me three pictures of Niagra falls with no water going over it' Which has happened due to ice dams.
I find all search engines right now are just scratching the surface of what can be done with all the information they hold. Once you can put the pieces together you can learn a whole lot more. All the information to figure out a certain thing may already be available, but we can't search effectively enough to find it.

Just my 2 cents.
Click to expand...

see this can already be done. its not so much the problem with the search engine as it is with the pages its searching. if people aren't using those descriptors, then it can't find it. which is the problem. to make searches better i think some sort of meta-tagging for pages/pictures and the like would be necessary and available for searches as well. although that could lead to abuse. so they'd have to be a way to report incorrect tagging and the like. etc.
 
Can't really think of anything really bad about google.

One thing I would like would be a easier and faster way to configure the language/country settings. for ex. show only sites written in English, Finnish or Swedish. Or sites that are located in Finland only. And so on...

Currently you can only select "search from every web page", "search only Finnish pages", "search pages located in: Finland" from Google.fi front page. Anything more complex and you'll have to go to "settings" and modify the settings from there...
 
Sorry, but my ideal search engine is Google. I just love it, always have. It has started to get a bit cluttered these days, which is what I hated about Yahoo, but it's still infinitely less cluttered than that monstrosity!

Maybe, at a push, I'd say Google with no ads? :p

Edit: No, actually, I even click those sometimes due to their relevancy. Damn!
 
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