Jane_Doe - 8:45 pm on Aug 29, 2002 (gmt 0)

The idea of a search service administered by a body of librarians, without any kind of commercial interest, governed by an international organization is precisely to avoid the kind of arbitrary exclusion you're talking about.

I just got an email yesterday from a librarian that my site on a particular health topic was "rejected for including unsuitable material" (her words exactly) for their online health directory. The site she rejected is listed in DMOZ, has a number of external links from high ranking web sites and it is one of Directhit's top ten most popular sites for its topic. It doesn't have any gaming or porn references. It's just about the benefits of proper nutrition, yoga and posture for a particular disorder, so by default one or all of those topics must be the "unsuitable material" she referred to. When I worry about abitrary site exclusion by librarians I'm speaking based on my actual experiences.

An online government sponsored search engine would still have to have a method of prioritizing which sites were returned for a given search term. If the librarians didn't prioritize the results manually, then you'd have to have programmed algorithms to do the task which, just brings you back to what Google has already.