Precious little of the "world's information" is even written down. Much of is it encoded in enduring transmission mechanisms such as music, the visual arts, religion and myths, for example. And almost all of the stuff that is written down isn't ever going to be accessible through the public internet for very practical reasons. You can get some of this piped into your computer if you're lucky enough to belong to a local library, but that's because a consensual social mechanism has been invoked to bypass such restrictions. What the internet's public search engines are left to work with is a toxic wasteland largely characterized by the generation of real time noise - both private and commercial - and what the machines churn out in answer to our hopeful "queries" isn't of much use to the rest of us.

To technologists, the solution is obvious: it's either going to require either a technical fix, or some huge change in social behavior, the creation of a world where we're all moored to our computers twenty four hours a day, so making society conform to the limitations of today's machines. But we all know this isn't going to happen. Fortunately, there are better ways out of this conundrum. [full article]

Microsoft has produced a search engine that's better in almost every way than Google, except for one: its search results are terrible.