Many years ago Gary Kildall, the true founder of the personal computer revolution, wrote these lines:
It was then that I learned that computers were
built to make money, not minds.”
We would do well to remember this quote today as you ponder how to get the search engines working for you. The name for these engines is even wrong. Most people think of the search engines as a tool for finding specific information that relates to a topic. In fact, that’s how I used Google to find the initial quote in this post. All wrong. Google (to quote Eric Lindquist)) is really a media company that relies on the chaos of the Internet to match searches with advertiser pitches.
When Microsoft announces it plans to beat Google at the search game, that’s nothing but propaganda. What Microsoft is saying is that they plan to be a media company that matches searches with advertiser pitches, and do it better than Google. The game is always who can make the most profit.
Note: All of the existing major search engines started at universities as true search engines. Google and Yahoo started at Stanford, Inktomi from the University of California, and Lycos from Carnegie Mellon. All have gone commercial.
If you are serious about the search engines and want the best book on it (#21 of all of Amazon’s sales now), you want the book The Search by John Battelle that is just out:
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