[Search-l] What others are doing.

[peter burden]

Hello,
    I came across an interesting news story at 
http://informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201202986
    The article extolls AI as a way of better understanding user queries 
however the following anonymous comment
    really caught my eye

> Congratulations! You've totally missed the mark. The problem is not 
> that the manner in which we enter search requests is cryptic nor that 
> the search engines don't do a good job of determining what we want. 
> The real problem is that they do a horrible job of determining what 
> sites have reasonably valid information and eliminating the link farms 
> and traps with no real content.

   Incidentally spotted the following job ads in a related article

>    Redmond, WA: Software Engineer in Live Search Data Mining team at Microsoft, Live Search Core Relevance group
>    Redmond, WA: Software Engineer, Web Search Relevance at Microsoft
>    Redmond, WA: Software Engineer, Live Search Dynamic Ranking at Microsoft
 And finally I wonder, after Google's e-Bay debacle, how well web 
advertising really works. Perhaps there's a
 bit of a draught round the Googleplex.