Are all Search Engines Brain Damaged?

by Lid

On November 11, 1990, Peter Deutsch announced the birth of Archie, the worlds first search engine, in a post titled “ An Internet archive server server” on Usenet. Incidentally, for those who didn’t know, Google acquired Deja.com’s complete Usenet archive (some 500 million messages) in 2001.

In the post, Deutsch describes Archie as

“pretty brain damaged”

He was right, and for me it was the beginning of a love/hate relationship with search that I am certain will continue forever.

With each new generation of perfect search, there was a glimmer of hope, and certainly they all brought something new, yet not one was without some degree of brain damage…maybe it’s hereditary.

Today, almost 17 years later I watch in hopeless fascination as Google roll out Universal Search.

There are a couple of great articles about Google’s Universal Search at Search Engine Land - Google 2.0: Google Universal Search by Danny Sullivan, and Adapting to Google’s Universal Search by Eric Ward, both written in plain English, and offering far better explanations than I ever could. My only comment on Universal Search is it’s still a bit buggy.

Sort of like this:

I have my fingers crossed that they have worked it out; not so much for me, I worked out years ago that I can pretty much hunt down anything on the Internet — OK, yes, sometimes it takes a few days and maybe search engine brain damage is not just hereditary, but also contagious (I think I’ve caught it) — but for everyone else out there who searches and never finds. And to quote Walt Mossberg: “ It isn’t your fault”.