That WolframAlpha thing is clearly biased. I mean,
a search for Stephen Hawking returns results with a picture, and
a search for Paris Hilton doesn't?! I mean, WTF?!
It's not bad though, nice/interesting layout. But looks like it's made "by the scientifically-minded for the scientifically-minded"
However that's not really a "Web search engine" at all. Google, Yahoo, etc. go out and crawl every page all over the world, whereas it seems like this one doesn't/has its own proprietary data bank.
In any case, once (if) they ever get good and interesting enough, Google will probably just buy them off...
(or is it
?)
bailewen wrote:Damn near impossible to get info on what a particular driver is for or what a certain registry entry does. All I get is sales pitches for sites that sell drivers or software that checks my registry.
I hear ya, but it's not the fault of the search engines as much as it is of the internet adapting to them to get more exposure.
In fact, they (at least Google) have done incredibly good job IMO filtering out BS pages whose whole purpose of existence is to get indexed near the top. I remember a few years ago a LOT of results were like that, until Google started filtering those out. Try searching for
some random phone number to see what I mean. It was like that when you searched for just about anything at all, several top results were porn-related links or other useless crap. Now there's a lot more relevance and, really, hats off to them for being able to balance between useful information and junk when filtering the ENTIRE WEB. Just as an example, I just searched for the word "test", and got "about 587,000,000 results (0.25 seconds)", with the top results being reasonably relevant and "sane" (i.e. I'm sure there are a lot of "test pages" out there that have that word in the title, content, keywords, etc. but they didn't come near the top.) That's VERY impressive work IMO.