Stemming Gone Wrong

In: search engines

23 Sep 2007

Look, Google, I actually know how to spell Chile, ok? Stemming “Chile” into “Chili” and polluting my queries with recipes and rock bands that have NOTHING TO DO WHATSOEVER with the country of Chile is not helping. I am not writing my queries in French (Chile is spelled Chili in that language). I seem to remember Google used to suggest alternate spellings and link to them. Now Google has decided they know better than the user and mix their braindead second-guessing into top 10 results. Way to go to destroy the product.
Anyway, back to using Yahoo as my primary engine, though in fairness it’s about as bad. It’s amazing how utterly useless many Google SERPs have become. Maybe I have higher expectations. Look for country-specific information (not just hotels and resorts) and you’ll quickly see what I mean. The current state of search is about as bad as Altavista circa 1998 I guess. It’s time someone pulled a Google on Google. Jerry Yang, I just gave you your roadmap. And do something useful please, let’s not waste our time on jokers that pretend hand-writing 10,000 pages is a substitute for a real search engine.

Comment Form

About this blog

I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.

Categories

Archives

  • chris: thanks, I googled JetBlue interview and your site pulled together a number of excellent articles in [...]
  • Tim Marman: Assuming the market exists, it seems like the biggest challenge here is getting potential customers [...]
  • Konstantinos: ...and one of your first readers from back then (Webvoice anyone?) is here to congratulate you and w [...]
  • Harun Akar: http://abnhost.com just started offering FogBugz hos [...]
  • Sergio Rebelo: "Do you mind hearing some situational irony? I found this entry through a google search." Yes... me [...]