europeforvisitors - 4:09 pm on Dec 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

In many ways the old about.com structure with payed editors had been a promising approach.

I was an About.com "guide" for 4-1/2 years, and I don't think anyone at About.com--even among the most hyperbolic marketing and PR types--regarded About.com as a substitute for search engines. For a short while, there was an effort to compete with the Yahoo directory (at least within the 500 or so topics covered by About.com at that time), but there's a big difference between a directory and spidered search.

As for the earlier example of "digital cameras," I'd point out that the problem isn't with the search engines, but with the inability or unwillingness of users to define what they're looking for. Whether a user types in a keyphrase ("digital cameras") or a plain-English statement ("I want help in picking out a digital camera"), there's no way that an automated search engine or a human-edited directory can supply a perfect answer. And if the user has the common sense to type in something reasonably precise ("Widgetco WC-1 camera review" or even "Widgetco WC-1 camera"), Google will supply remarkably good results most of the time. (I say this as someone who's done a lot of research into digital cameras with the help of Google.)