An Unhappy Ego-Surfer
Posted by themischord on January 30, 2008
For a long time now, a Google search for my name has been pretty disappointing and embarrassing. Yahoo! and MSN Live give more respectable results. I guess the question is, what is representative of me? I find my name on the web in the following contexts
Blog/Homepage
Association with organizations/ academic institutions
Publications
Mailing Lists
Misc references
A regular search result is a unorganized list of pages from all the above categories. I see that the mailing lists take precedence, which is not surprising. On the whole, I find it all messy.
The larger issue here is the ineffectiveness of search engines when it comes to informational queries (compared to navigational queries). An evaluation conducted by Prof. Bing Liu shows that Google fairs just a wee-little better than Yahoo! and MSN Live. In this context, I found kosmix’s approach very promising. They call it a vertical search. They organize the results into categories, like a homepage. Ah well, some day they should be ‘tags’ and not ‘categories’ maybe. That would be a great feature next feature for Google.
