tedster - 9:35 pm on Aug 30, 2009 (gmt 0)

...instead of doing what a search engine in my opinion should do: Query search results for the exact words I type into the seach box.

Those days are definitley leaving us and we all need to adapt, I guess. It's probably an inevitable shift, with the huge number of documents now published on the web. Maybe we can hope for a future evolution that allows the user a way to choose some preference. The new "Show options" addition has been extremely useful in this area.

I'm thinking now about two different kinds of searches I often make. One is a simple informational search. Any website that has this information will suit me. Another type is more navigtational. I'm looking for a specific web page that I read before without noting the domain name and didn't bookmark. In this case, other web pages that have a version of the information may not be useful -- I may want to find the author of that specific page, or its publication date, for example.

In that second navigational case, I find myself the most frustrated by this new evolution in search and the continuous churn and everflux in the results.

And yet, for all my frustration, I have found myself bookmarking pages less and less in recent times. So apparently I do have more confidence that a search engine, often Google, will help me locate the information again when I need it.