Build Date: Tue Oct 22 17:50:06 2024 UTC
If you space out your little rants a bit more, you'd probably get bigger laughs.
-- Crackmonkey
Web Search Engines Are Falling Down on the Job!
1999-07-07 18:18:38
Scientists say that all of the search engines -- AltaVista, Google, Excite, etc., etc., -- have absolutely MISERABLE performance, and they are getting WORSE. Not a single engine has indexed more than 16% of the Web's estimated 800 million pages.
Even when you combine the results of all the major search engines together, they only cover approximately 40% of the 15 terabytes of data available on the web.
How are you supposed to even do a search like that?! Metacrawler and Dogpile, etc., aren't comprehensive enough. You would have to write your own search tools or something! And that would make you CRAZY!
When the same scientists (researchers at NEC) looked at search engines in 1997, coverage was significantly BETTER. Last time around, some search engines managed to cover as much as a third of the web. So basically, the web has been growing so fast, and getting so OBESE, that the search engines have not been able to keep up for one reason or another...
Meanwhile, HotBot, Excite, Lycos, etc., keep adding new gadgets and features, and redesigning their interfaces and home pages.
AltaVista, for instance, recently added "paid listings" (read: bribes to skew search results) and they redid their home page again this month. That's another thing that the study points out -- search engines are badly BIASED in favor of commercial stuff in the United States. They don't index stuff at universities (.edu) or in Canadia (.ca) as much. So "paid listings" are probably not going to help matters there.
Maybe the search engines should try concentrating on COVERAGE. Barry Rubinson, AltaVista's VP of Engineering, says their index currently contains only 150 million pages. Now AltaVista has a a new "Search Freshness Guarantee," reminiscent of Budweiser's "Born On Dating," which promises that links are only a month old at most. That's great, but how are they going to live up to their stated goal of indexing the ENTIRE WEB?
I mean, GAR!! If you search for "+Pigdog +DiCaprio" NO RESULTS COME BACK. We have told them to index our "Leonardo DiCaprio Exposed As A Freemason!" article a hundred times!
To be fair, AltaVista has been going through some tumultuous times, being sold on the auction block and whatnot, and I don't mean to just pick on them...
Netscape, for another example, just redesigned their search engine, too. It now uses Google instead of Excite, and it has some sort of voodoo shit from "Smart Browsing" thrown in.
Crapola Engine, Northern Lights, supposedly has the most comprehensive index. I just tried a search for "Pigdog" on it, and the whole thing timed out (Uh, great).
The results of this search engine study are published in an article in "Nature." So I'm not making this up. These search engines are quite impotent.
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
During a magnificent sunny day in a fast receding autumn, the Spock Science Monitor reporters once again blew the playa dust off of their computers and covered the 2002 Burning Man Decompression – held every year just east of Portola Hill in beautiful San Francisco. Both an afternoon and evening issues were released to the unsuspecting crowd of freaks attempting to in some small way experience the euphoria of the playa – if but for a brief afternoon far from the desolation of Northern Nevada. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Johnnie Royale's Guide to Wakes
Wakes can present problems for Bad People of the Future. (If you don't know what a BPotF is, you need to read more of the PDJ.) Sure, your friend is gone and you miss him and that really sucks; it does, I know. But all Bad People of the Future are gonna die, and they have all accepted that fact. They do deserve, however, to have one final kickass party to celebrate all the bad things they've done in the past, present and future. And you, as a friend, have to make sure that their desire for a final send off is well executed (sorry for the pun). That's just the way of BPotFdom. (More...)
A Blast from the Past! Pao Tzu goes over and under the crucial variables in the production and consumption of Salvia Divinorum. A must read for psychonauts of all stripes. (More...)
40 Acres, a Mule, and a Crummy 90-Second Spot on Weekend Update
Consider the plight of the Black Man. The Black Man on "Saturday Night Live," I mean. Has there ever been a more pathetic thing than a token unredeemed for 28 years? Where is the NAACP when you really need them? (More...)