Re: Thoughts on Bing

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents-montreal org>]

> [...] none of the popular web search engines, including Google,
> provide them.  (Again, not a criticism: not much point in providing
> features for 0.0001% of the user base.)

I'm not sure how fair it is to speak of people submitting search
requests as Google's (and other similar organizations') "user base".
This implies that the primary purpose is to serve those people, which
hasn't been true for a long time.  The actual situation is that people
performing searches are the product and the advertisers are the
customers; the search results are just the coin in which the searchers
are paid for being part of the product.

> It's very difficult to figure out what "the results you want" are,
> let alone provide them, when input is just a list of words.

I see no reason to think they'd care, and reason to think they
wouldn't.  Some years ago I had occasion to look for a music
typesetting system called "SMUT".  I'm sure you can imagine the false
positives.  When I found they persisted even when I added
supposedly-exclusionary terms to the search like "-sex -pussy", I wrote
to them about this.  Did they fix their exclusionary syntax to work, to
not return results I specifically indicated I didn't want?  No; they
added "typesetting" to a list of search terms which prevented their
engine from returning that clutter.

IOW, even an explicit indication that you don't want certain results is
not enough to stop them from returning them.  They clearly don't care
what searchers anti-want; I see no reason to think they'd care what
searchers _do_ want.

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