I’m not sure that the result are actually bad. I think the problem is that the larger culture doesn’t really have the words needed to accurately describe what we’re looking for most of the time.

To me, it’s the opposite of “Eskimo words for snow” problem. For example I may be looking for something like the “Strong And Intense” photo. What would I type in? I’ve always loved the “turnabout bondage” films and photo shoots but I’ll be danged if I can find a search term that’s even useful there and it’s not like the porn spammers are even touching the word “turnabout”. There’s a whole genre there with no word describing it. “Harmony Philosophy of Love Bondage” could well descibe an entire subculture but I’d have a devil of a time searching for adult content that matched that phase that came from anywhere other than Harmony.

And the words we do use are often subcultured and not always easy to find. Why do we use “Shibari” instead of “Kinbaku” to the extent that we do?

I really don’t think it’s the fault of the search engines. We simply don’t have the words to search for yet and the words we do have still haven’t crossed from subculture to mainstream.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but we don’t have the thousand words yet, just a heck of a lot of pictures.

The first web search engine was populated by people, well, a person. Back in the old days (very early 90’s) all web sites world wide were collected in a text list to be shared around so people could find them. That became untenable.

Then followed the indexes. Yahoo was originally a list compiled by hand of as many sites as possible. There was some automation to find new sites, but these were checked before being added. Growth was such that that also became untenable.

Then the limited automation became the full automation of latter search engines. It implied a level of trust in what was published. That too also worked for a while, and still does to some extent. Google is a good example, but only one of many. There are some technical limitations due to the stupendous data size, that is one of the challenges involved.

This is just bringing it back a level to the by hand indexes of before. Cheap too, as this time the people compiling the site lists are unpaid. Being unpaid however will make it just as subject to gaming as the other techniques.

Google is definitely the search engine Goliath, but they’re still no match for a well organized militia of zombie computers infected by a clever virus, like the Storm botnet.

yay for the web-head!