The World Wide $#@%@$ing Web!

© 2000 Updated 11:00 PM ET December 23, 2000

Search engines need to improve to keep their audience from going berserk with Web-rage, a new survey suggests.

Welcome to the World Wide $#%!ing Web, where it takes just thirty seconds of a bumpy information expedition to transform some tech-loving clickaholics into lunatics, a survey has found.

On average, Web-rage is uncaged after twelve minutes of fruitless searching, although about seven percent of the 566 people surveyed by Roper Starch Worldwide say ire starts rising within three minutes.

The main culprit: All that information--overwhelming at times--which is actually driving some people offline and back to telephoning customer service or other information resources from the pre-cyber generation.

At last count, search engine Google was perusing 1.3 billion Web pages, which isn't even 20 percent of the capacity under just the ".com" top level domain (TLD). The Web will get even more crowded next year when addresses with even new TLDs start rolling out.

"A great majority, (86 percent) of Internet users feel that a more efficient way to search the Web for accurate information should be in place," Roper Starch Worldwide researchers wrote.

The survey also found that nearly a third of Web users say they need to spend about two hours a week searching for the information they want, with a majority (71 percent) becoming frustrated regardless of whether they are successful or not.

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, points out another telling statistic: that more than half, or about 54 percent of those using search engines, don't get frustrated by wrong results.

"Maybe that underscores the fact that a majority expects to get wrong information," he said.

Sullivan adds that some sites, like Ask.com or MSN, are also making life a little easier for its users. The two sites take into account that people don't always know how to spell what they are looking for.

MSN, for example, found that people were using dozens of different spellings of "HotMail," he said. So MSN took that into account when deciding on what answers to return.

While it doesn't name any engines by name, the survey does take a swipe at those that return a large number of results, such as Google or Alta Vista. The survey was sponsored by natural language search engine WebTop.

Google spokesman David Krane was quick to say the search engine isn't perfect, and its evolution is not complete. But that doesn't mean it's simply spewing out an uncontrollable pile of Web pages.

"Google hasn't achieved our objective to build the perfect search engine as of yet," he said. "At the same time, one of the attributes we're particularly proud of is that Google does deliver highly relevant and accurate search results, which is one area we are very proud of."

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2000

Answers

Google spokesman David Krane was quick to say the search engine isn't perfect, and its evolution is not complete.********** But that doesn't mean it's simply spewing out an uncontrollable pile of Web pages. '**************

NOPE.....THAT IS ***UNCLE BOOB'S FUNCTION IN LIFE.***********

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2000

cpr

Merry Christmas, dick-head...

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2000

I use Alta-Vista the most. My complaints are that it returns too many dead links, it's only updated to include new pages about once a month, and it returns multiple links to the same content and/or site.

But you can get meaningful information if you're careful how you phrase the search. I used something like "+music +midi +christmas +download" to get a list of MIDI Christmas music sites, for example.

And when Anita mentioned Hayes v. Tilden and that article that she couldn't find again, I used something like "+Hayes +Tilden +election +congress +dispute" and zeroes right in on it.

You CAN'T just enter a single (or two) word(s) on any of them and expect useful results. You have to be very specific.

And yes, it is annoying that they're so sensitive to incorrect spelling.

-- Anonymous, December 24, 2000