Lady Dagger wrote:
> I am disappointed in the change of how the web search engines work now (not
> just yours, but all of them it seems)!!
And your entire post has WHAT to do with Internet Explorer, the topic of
*this* newsgroup? Internet Explorer is not a search engine. Internet
Explorer is a web browser.
I didn't write a web-based search engine for you to use. I'm just
another user like yourself. We here are all just users. This is a
community of your peers. It is NOT a free venue to support from
Microsoft. That Microsoft provided a webnews-for-dummies gateway to
Usenet doesn't alter that this is Usenet.
What is Usenet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroups
http://www.masonicinfo.com/newsgroups.htm
http://www.mcfedries.com/Ramblings/usenet-primer.asp
Since you never bothered to identify WHICH search engine you are whining
about, I'll assume you meant Google's search.
> I was looking for a hotel, and it
> used to be
Oh, a highly specific timeline of "used to be", uh huh. Could be you
haven't used a search engine in over a decade and when there were a lot
less sites to catalog.
> if I typed in Monterey Surf Inn (for instance),
Obviously you entered a very poor search string. Your string of
"Monterey Surf Inn" means to find every record from the database that
has "Monterey" OR "Surf" OR "Inn". There are a hell of a lot of inns in
the world. There are a lot of surfer and oceanography sites related to
"surf". There are a lot of places and shops with the name "Monterey".
Then YOU chose to OR each of those results together to compile a really
huge list. You asked for X "Monterey's" plus Y "Surf's" plus Z "Inns".
That total of X + Y + Z is going to be huge. Entering:
Monterey Surf Inn
is the same as entering:
Monterey OR Surf OR Inn
and gives a Google search result count of 47,600 hits - PLUS if you had
noticed the
www.montereysurf.inn site is right at the top (because they
paid Google to present their site in the sponsored list that precedes
the general search results).
If you wanted to narrow your search then you should have AND'ed the
results from searching on each word and entered:
+Monterey +Surf +Inn
which results in 37,200 hits. If you knew the place had exactly that
name and to even further limit the results count, you should've used:
"Monterey Surf Inn"
(including the double quotes to delimit the string) to list only those
records with that exact string. That gives 4,710 hits - a tenth of the
results count for the search that you used.
> It would list that
> direct hotel site at the very top. It would be the first thing that came up.
In each of my searches, including your poorly constructed one, yep, the
Monterey Surf Inn was listed right there at the top.
> Now, instead, I get tons of sites that mention it on their site, or sell
> rooms too, or even have some map of where it is, but I can't get to the
> direct hotel site.
Because of your poor search that OR'ed the result of searching on each
word instead of the entire string. But then the hotel was listed in
every search result in the sponsored hits that precede the general hits.
> And that's only what I've searched for tonight. But I've
> had it happen with everything I search for lately!! Not just hotels, that
> was just an example.
Because the common denominator is you. You are entering very poor
search criteria which results in NOT narrowing down the results.
> It's so frustrating to constantly not get what you are
> really searching for!!! I HATE search engines now!! Can't you please change
> them back?!?!
I'm sure you'll get to hate cameras, too, if you keep forgetting to take
off the lens cap.
Linear Mode
