I believe in concrete examples, and I try to have a link to a certain site for every post in this blog. I was going to write about permalinks, and needed a site, so I fed the word "permalink" to a few search engines. After all, Web Guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that we "finally have effective Web-wide search engines". Here's the top result from each (in alphabetic order):
About.com: Robotic.com;
AlltheWeb: ESPN: Spurrier Resings as Gators Coach;
AltaVista: BLOGGER: How to add Permalinks to your site;
AskJeeves: Climb to the Stars: Coding PHP Permalinks for Blogger;
AOL: Kustard;
Google: Schwack Weblog: Careful, Tim...
Hotbot: Robotic.com;
Lycos: ESPN: Spurrier Resigns as Gators Coach;
MSN: Typographer.com
Search.com: Permalink (didn't load);
Sherlock (via Lycos): Barlow Farms.
Old trusty Altavista won this time. Such experiments are always sobering. I expected different blogs to show up, but the ESPN article? Although so very in vogue, Google didn't perform any better than the others. Maybe Jill should expand her "Currency of the Web" experiment?
Lucas D. Introna and Helen Nissenbaum argue that the politics of search engines matters. I couldn't agree more. Not that I expect magic from these tools, but from Norway, an article about American college football is just not relevant. All the more discouraging that the Norwegian-built AlltheWeb was one of two (!) returning that page.
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