What Do You Want From A Search Engine?

[cdnvic]

I use Google by default as there's honestly nothing else out there that can compete, although there's minor promise coming from Bing. But even if the new Yahoo/MS deal produces some competition, they don't even come close to delivering the functionality of earlier search engines.

What I want is:

- To be able to block any domain from search results so that I can filter out all the useless directories that have no info, only more links.

- To be able to filter out blogs and other pages that are just regurgitated content.

- To be able to choose ads that target a certain region, just like I can with websites (yes, the ads can be helpful sometimes)

A lot of this could benefit the search companies themselves, and it's all been done before at one time or another. Endless directories would not have gotten into Yahoo's original human edited directory, and the powerful, ultra-configerable Altavista was so good at customizing search results, but Yahoo Inc managed to screw both of them up. With a near monopoly, don't look at Google to be making any of this easy in the near term either.

[Gary A]

What's very irritating to me is when searching for a specific item, all sorts of sites come up that have nothing to do with what I am searching for. Sites like Alibaba come up with their thousands of links. Other Internet marketing sites often come up and a search through them finds that they have NOTHING to offer.

[CosmicSurfer]

I loved AltaVista...

Don't you hate progress....

It's the same with Web 2.0.. pages are getting so integrated and complicated, it's getting hard to find the wheat for the chaff.

And do I really need to know everytime a friend takes a Dump...

Social networking has to have limits also...

With all the reading needed to just keep up, little time left for living.

CS

[klikster]

One of the things Google doesn't do very well is weed out "stubs" (pages in a portal that have all the SEO and headers, but no content).

[d0ndela]

Agreed klikster, Google doesn't penalize the SEO exploiters nearly as much as it should.

Try googling "top sports stories and sports headlines" (include the quotes so it's exact matches only) and have a look at those 80 pages and tell me they shouldn't be banned from Google's index? They are all based on some adsense templates you can buy (or find in a torrent somewhere) and the people who put them online didn't even bother to change the wording

[quiksilva]

For business, I want a popular search engine which I can easily tailor my site to.

For personal use, I want convenience but most importantly lots of relevant results (even with a slight sacrifice to speed)

[majorpacman]

Something more spicy then google....it is being used way too much.That how they will get your personal ID and your first born. Lot more competitions.

[JetsetBkk]

If my first attempt at Googling something turns up a load of irrelevant sites, I look to see what is common in those results.

For example, if my search turns up a load of results with the word "cooking" in them and I'm not interested in them, I do the search again after adding "-cooking" to the search box.

That eliminates those results. Then repeat the process until what's left is relevant enough to click on.

I think Google is great. Have always used it, sometimes tried others, but always come back to it.