Improved search engine technology is moot?

There is no comparison of results for Google vs. Microsoft search here, but the authors actual point is worth a note. I think the author is saying that improved search engine technology only searches part of the internet and THAT is not a very significant amount of the actual information available. Most valuable information is obtained in a social context and search engines don't do that............

Microsoft's Google-killer arrives with a 'whuh?'

The Register,

 "Google's executives might be sleeping a little easier this weekend after Microsoft unveiled its much-hyped new search engine. It's fast, slick, and comes with a raft of interesting new features: confounding some expectations as surely as it confirms others. In short, Microsoft has produced a search engine that's better in almost every way than Google, except for one: its search results are terrible..........

Precious little of the "world's information" is even written down. Much of is it encoded in enduring transmission mechanisms such as music, the visual arts, religion and myths, for example. And almost all of the stuff that is written down isn't ever going to be accessible through the public internet for very practical reasons. You can get some of this piped into your computer if you're lucky enough to belong to a local library, but that's because a consensual social mechanism has been invoked to bypass such restrictions. What the internet's public search engines are left to work with is a toxic wasteland largely characterized by the generation of real time noise - both private and commercial - and what the machines churn out in answer to our hopeful "queries" isn't of much use to the rest of us."

8:12:01 PM