Best Search Engine: Testing Blekko Vs. Google Vs. Bing - The Daily Beast
Originally posted 12/7/2010
I will always have a soft spot for new search engines, because search is where I got my start. Way back in the mid-80s, when I was but a poor grad student, I became quite enamored of heuristic search algorithms. So enamored, in fact, that I wrote my dissertation about them. Regrettably, the powers that be of the time (the powers that were?) had determined that there was nothing interesting to say about search, and that the topic was no longer suitable for consideration by AI researchers.
Still, search did play a central role in my thinking and research for five years or so, and it showed up in my teaching assignments (my favorite term project assignment was a dating service--commonplace today, but still interesting back in '87). Which is precisely why I still perk up when I hear about--yet another--new search engine.
The entrance of search into the commercial realm raised some interesting questions. Back in the day, we used to assume that all users were at least reasonably sophisticated, educable to the point that they would devise reasonable sets of key words. In some cases, we actually made them learn query languages. In others, we just assumed that they knew what they were doing.