[Search-l] Grub Update

[John McCormac]

peter burden wrote:
> John McCormac wrote:
> 
> And that's only some of the problems. ;-)

The .eu is a disaster zone thanks to the incompetence of EURid and the 
European Commission. People in Europe are concentrating on the ccTLDs 
and the .com TLD as their primary business brands and ignoring .eu in 
droves. (But I've already written about this elsewhere. ;) and have even 
  been quoted in Wired. )

I think that the main, high quality, growth over the next few years will 
be in the ccTLDs and that is one of Google's main vulnerabilities and it 
is one battlefield on which a new search engine can defeat Google and 
the other large search engines.

> and did this check - as I recall I was seeing ~20/30% of active web sites
> having no incoming links according to Google.

Extrapolating that to the main part of .uk (.co.uk) and the ccTLDs would 
explain some of Google's (and that of the other main search engines) 
performance in ccTLD search. Even the TLDs would have millions of 
websites that the conventional search engines miss.

> In my experience an equally significant effort is required for setting 
> up and
> tweaking filters to reject unwanted and irrelevant documents and avoiding
> any one of several >>interesting<< spider traps.

Running a good search engine is an on-going task. The more I look at 
this project, the more I wonder if it is just an idea without a real 
plan. Perhaps it is just at too early a stage and people are still 
caught up in the buzz of a new venture.

I don't know if the aquisition of Grub involved cash. But if it did, it 
may have been a case of Wikia having had more money than sense. It will 
need a major overhaul to make it useful.

Regards...jmcc
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