I’m glad you’re okay, and I generally find your posts useful and interesting, but you might want to cut the search engines a little slack. Why?

Your own “algorithm” made an error that leapt out at me; I’m surprised no one else picked up on it. Go back to the Ask screenshot, and look carefully at the entry with the purple link. The URL appears to be a blog post, and part of the string is 2005/07 – in other words, this isn’t relevant either. It was clearly posted in July 2005, at the time of the Tube bombings. I suspect it was the comment about the bombs being ineffective that ‘got’ you.

Don’t feel too bad about the slip; I have spent a lot of time doing very careful research, and have trained myself to take in details. But if a highly intelligent person is capable of a slip like that, how can we expect algorithms designed by fallible people to always get it right? Search works well enough for those who know how to use it; I don’t think it will ever be possible to make it work all the time for those who won’t take the time to learn how to get good results.

Yep, absolutely, I know plenty of places to find current news. This was more a test on what people who might not would encounter at the search engines. Plenty continue to rely on default searching even thought that’s not the best tool for getting news. But that’s also why Google and Ask in particular have rolled out new systems that are supposed to especially help these people.

What a thorough post! Well done. It just goes to show how demanding we’ve become of our search engines. Just remember what Amit Singhal said in the New York Times last month: “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds.”

I also noticed you got some comments from people suggesting news sites and other places you could go to for the info you were after. I presume you are familiar with all of these, are highly capable of visiting BBC.co.uk on your own, and were merely conducting an experiment to see how the search engines handled a hot query. Based on this experience, do you think it should be the search engines’ job to immediately index relevant news? Or is it our responsibility to discern among different information sources for different types of information?

People get search queries “wrong” all the time. But that’s the point of Universal Search at Google or Ask3D. They are billed as ways to help searchers even if they aren’t precise enough.

I also have to caution everyone that once you poke at a particular set of results, it’s not uncommon to see those results get better for a range of factors. Time alone can improve them, plus the search engines themselves might make tweaks to solve problems.

Was a “bomb” found or a “car bomb” ? Long post for nothing if it was a “car bomb”…

Don’t mean to hijack danny’s post, but did you notice any spikes to the main UK news sites as well (in terms of direct traffic)?

Cheers,

Ciarán

Can’t believe how close we were all sat just down the road in Mint Leaf. As DaveN said in his post we must have all walked past the place the car was parked.