Yahoogle no more

Both Yahoo and Google have served many of us well, but now that the internet has been almost full for two years or more, I think the days of search engines as we know them are numbered.

No, the combined yahooglesearch.com is not the next new solution, it runs on the same old two engines side-by-side.

What is it about the big two that sucks? 

(and almost any other search engine as we know it)

Take a closer look. Click the picture. What do you see?

Yes, 70,900 results on Yahoo and about 10,500 on Google for "yahoogle search engine". Different results. But that is not the juicy sucky point. What else? A bit of context, just around where the engine found your search term. Looks normal. Helps to choose the right hit.

Check it out, open a new window and search something of your own interest. 

Select one of the hits you like and click through. You know the exercise...

Waaah! Where on that page are my keywords?

That sucks. Now, don't tell me you are fast with your browser's [Ctrl-F] key, enter your keywords again and find them on the page. That damn engine already knew where on that page it found your hit, but then was instructed to forget about it. Making you enter it again is broken! Alzheimer's. Wasting your time.

Almost as bad as some SAP Netweaver search results I saw in a company intranet - full of dupes in search results and fraught with useless related data. No focus, confusing relevance, no differentiation whether the term was found in a title, in the text, or in metadata. An ergonomics nightmare, almost as devastating to information workers as the earthquake to Haitians. Almost every bit of information supposed to be found and re-usable  was in an attachment; prolonging needless suffering from the expensive and unworkable paper document metaphor. Thanks, @mikey3982 for that article.

Despite the professional SEO wizardry and AdSense that make search engines indispensable, this is a serious internet impediment to me. Have we gotten so used to lossy click-through context that we fail to vote with our time and demand improvement? It can be done. See, 1996 Lotus Notes 4.5 at least highlighted the search term on the page you clicked through to. Very helpful. And in compliance with ISO 9241-110, for example.

Fourteen internet years later, Yahoogle & Co. still #fail us?

Looking for brilliant programming wizards or an organization who know to listen and observe users, and who put a context hit function in place. You will gain instant followers. Me at least, and instantly. And don't ever think of patenting that - you did read it first on Purple Pointr. The internet hardly forgets.

What is your method to get a fix on where your keywords hide on the target page?

_{This post (i) inspired by my wife, who used to work as a software coach with management consultants.}