Saturday, August 30, 2003

NiMH batteries and the problem with Google

MIT.EDU article on NiMH batteries

I wanted to learn more about rechargeable AA sized batteries. I tried standard google. All I got was reams of vendors. Usenet (Google Groups) was better. Best of all was a google search limited to .EDU sites. That's how I got the above reference, which is excellent.

There's tons of stuff like this out there. Problem is, Google can't find it. People complain about blogs taking up Google's top rankings, but usually the blogs provide interesting information. The much bigger problem is commercial sites. They're pushing reference material off the index.

Google needs a way to identify commercial sites, and a way to EXCLUDE them from searches. Problem is, they're Google's revenue stream. This fundamental conflict of interest will weaken internet search until someone comes up with a revenue stream aligned with the interests of the consumers. (Best of all would be if #!$#! internet users were willing to PAY for search services. I would, but there's only a dozen of us.)

It would be really cool if a metasearch site found a way to run google searches, strip out the commercial content, and display the results ...

No comments: