More Better Search

A Comment Tom made on my last post about Google really got me thinking.

I often wonder if it's not just a skill that we need to teach people - data mining, or searching. I can often find stuff very quickly when my wife has been looking for a half hour because I can think of ways to quantify the search better to find information that's useful. With more and more information that is available and the amount growing, searching is rapidly becoming less useful than it was even a year or two ago. If I find that I need real information about a single thing, I'm more likely to search Wikipedia than Google now.

Tom homepage

I do use Wikipedia a lot lately. I use it as much as I use Google. I think I am starting to use them for two different kinds of information. It I am looking for a Fact, concept, or statistic I start with Wikipedia. If I am looking for a web site, data that is specific to a web site, or questions about a product I use Google.

Often I come upon a question I know that I will not find an answer using Google. I find that I want to be able to ask a question and get an answer. Now I have to ask the question of myself, analysis what kind of website would have the answer to that questions, and figure out the right combination of keywords that will bring me to that data.

I think that this means that Google can be beat by another company. Google was much better than the search engines that came before it. That does not mean another search engine could not be better than them.