A buddy of mind recently started working at InfoSpace, a successful Web search company based in Bellevue. In conversation, he mentioned that they were the company behind dogpile.com, an aggregation search engine that queries MSN, Google, etc, for their results and then sorts them after some analysis. Being the kind of friend I am today, I figured I'd give them a run for their money by dogpiling myself.

The first result set came back a little different than I had expected:

At first, I was impressed that somehow Google thought to associate me with Linux training. However, my pride was quickly turned to horror as I found that most of the other top results were related to male performance issues! Also ironic was that the fourth result was for health.msn.com, but was found via Google Ads.

Figuring there must be a mistake, I figured I'd fire off another self-dogpile:

This time, no "tech training" love, just more adult-themed help offerings. I hit Refresh a few times to see if the results would change. After about a dozen refreshes, I ended up with one that had pure content:

I've come to three possible conclusions:

1. The first two letters of my first name are a common acronym for a condition which may require the help these results offer. Perhaps the dogpile engine and/or the engines it consumes make this distinction and assume that any request that contains "ed" wants unsolicited links to offers you can only find in your Inbox hundreds of times each day.
2. The dogpile engine is extremely sophisticated and actually knows that it's me searching for myself, so it assumes that I must need help in certain other aspects of my life. Either that or it's making fun of me, which doesn't make me feel any better.
3. Everyone gets these ads.

Regardless, I don't see using dogpile anytime soon. There's nothing that pisses me off more than a search engine that doesn't search for what I ask it to search for. The whole idea of searching for "ed kaim" (with quotes) is that I want results that contain that exact phrase. If you can't do that right, I can't even consider you. Yeah, I'm sure they feel they're "helping" me, but screw that. I know what I'm doing. If you think I spelled a word wrong, run the search I gave you and put a note in that I might have misspelled something. If you're right, I'll search again with your suggestion.

A reliable, helpful search engine is worth its weight in gold (which is why you can get a PE of 60 and still be considered undervalued).

I probably use Google to search the Web 100+ times each day. I hacked together a simple home page that provides a form for easily accessing google's search engine. It has two boxes (one for single words and the other for a phrase) and a submit button. My search process is:

1. Press Ctrl+Esc to open the Start Menu
2. Press I to launch Internet Explorer
3. Press Tab twice to select into the first input (words) or three times to get to the phrase input
4. Type the thing I'm looking for
5. Press Enter to execute the search on Google

Even better is that IE's autocomplete makes it very easy for me to scope results very quickly. For example, I can tab into the phrase input and type a period ("."), which will give me the three items I've used (".net framework", ".net compact framework", and ".net framework 2.0") so that I can press the down arrow a few times and get the whole thing included without having to retype. A few years ago I actually found that this model is better than using my local MSDN installation and have stopped installing MSDN since. The reasons are:

1. You get better results (not just the 400 places where an item was footnoted in an XML doc comment)
2. It's faster (loading an instance of IE and the local page is cheap vs local MSDN)
3. It uses less memory
4. It's always relatively recent without requiring maintenance from me

Yes, it doesn't work without an Internet connection. Fortunately, I almost always have one.

Anyway, I'm sure you can do all of this stuff in other browsers on other OSes. My point is that Web search is so critical to my job that I can't even consider an engine that doesn't search like I ask. I could easily hack up my home page to use another provider, but I haven't found one that does better than Google. Given that, I can't even believe that there are search engines out there that won't even search for what you ask for. Seriously.

11/7/2006 2:33:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]