coldcall - 7:58 am on Jan 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

GSX - I completely agree with you. As a trainer of people I know that most peoples ability to search is terrible. They have no idea of what to type into that box.

There is a projector in the reception area of the Googleplex in Mountain view and you can see from the things people are typing in around that most of them are clueless. No use of quote marks for text strings etc,.

My point is if Google had more income they could afford to train people (on-line, automated) on how to use search properly. I rarely have to do more than two searches to find what I want.

Google is really an information tool. It helps you find out stuff. Properly used it could give rise to a whole new generation of information businesses. My point is if people don't pay for it, it will never get much better than it is now and while it is good, it could be a lot better.

On another subject, the reason people don't pay for music is that it is not sold in the form and unit size they want. I want to buy a single song for not more than a dollar. Music companies don't offer me that. I don't want to buy a whole album of songs for one or two songs I might like. So I download them using Kazaa.

If a song cost less than $1 and I was assured of a certain quality, then I would just by it from the official site. Kazaa doesn't give me any kind of quality control, but when the song is OK it is just as good (to my ears anyway) as the official song.

People will pay for search (or anything else) if they are convinced there is a difference worth paying for.