Worst search engine EVER! (and also maybe the best)
Ann writes in her Blog about her favorite search engine (not Google). Pah. A paltry analysis. (No offense. :-)) I can go one better: the worst search engine EVER.It's at my local public library. You can't use it for a search. If you enter two search terms, it will search on the first one and ignore the second, meaning it will never find anything requiring two terms (in my case, books on the #1 Ladies Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith). Forget that. The only terms among those which will yield any results at all are "detective" (several hundred) and "smith" (thousands). And of course, you can't page back -- the previous page is nearly always expired.
I asked the librarians about these phenomena and they told me (a) their interface to their database is different from what's presented to the customers, and (b) they can't find anything on the customers' search engine either. So. Why even bother to have it? Why not use those terminals for the Internet instead? And ask the librarian to help you find a book?
NOTE: Ann deserves credit for her analysis. (I was only kidding about the "paltry" thing.) Her favorite, GoodSearch, channels advertising dollars to charitable organizations -- Ann's favorite is Save Darfur. I just entered as a charity September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. :-)
posted by Ron @ 11:17 PM
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