Google will have its IPO shortly, and just in time arch-rival-for-advertising-dollars Yahoo leaks word that it plans to dump Google technology for its own search engine technology. I used to love Google; it was a vast improvement over other search engines when it appeared, and, for my purposes, it’s still the best around. But it has severe limitations, and rather than improving, it’s gotten worse over the years as commercial interests have learned to game its technology and assure that their sites come up from searches rather than more useful sites. Try doing a search for a particular hotel, for example, and you will be bombarded with travel agent sites instead of reviews of that hotel. Beyond that, here are two improvements I would like to see in Google or future competitors: (1) the ability to do Boolean searches; and (2) the ability to search for webpages created within any time frame that one selects–currently, Google’s “advanced” search option allows only very limited time-related options, and then only for when a site was last “updated.” Let’s say I want to find out whether any web pages created (or at least first spidered) in the last two weeks mention my book Only One Place of Redress. Can’t do it. The folks at Google perhaps should spend less time creating clever special-occasion graphics around the word “Google” on their home page and more time improving search capabilities. My own gut feeling is that Google is very vulnerable to an aggressive competitor. (And I wonder if Google has intentionally not improved its search engine much, the better to encourage visitors to click on the sponsored links that provide its revenue; a good short-term strategy to help the balance sheet before an IPO, but a long-term disaster when a rival exploits the weaknesses in Google-searching.)
UPDATE: As several readers pointed out, Google does have some Boolean capabilities, but what I am really after is the ability to search for close-word searches, like (David /2 Bernstein) or (David /s Bernstein), as one can on Westlaw or Lexis. And another reader points out that Friday’s Washington Post contained a useful article on alternatives and enhancements to Google.
FURTHER UPDATE: I’ve since learned that doing the search David * Bernstein provides what appears to be a David /s Bernstein search. You can learn amazingly useful things from blogging.
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