Three search strings that have failed miserably in the past two days:

Opening times of supermarkets in Ouistreham

Long-ish range weather forecast for Normandy

definition of ‘information types’

Interesting…..

Partly because for some types of queries, the web is fine - type in ‘Pearl Binder’ - someone I’d never heard of until a few days ago when I stumbled across some wonderful illustrations in a book - and I’ve found out masses in a matter of seconds.

But for other types of queries the web just doesn’t seem to work at all. Now I don’t think this is just about semantics. There is a much wider issue about information management and organisation, structure, description and so on - and data quality.

There’s a need for a sub-web application that enables real users (who might have to sign up and verify who they are to do this) to rate web pages (getting the anti-spam right would be the critical area). There has to be some way of removing all the dross from searches; this would give everyone a much better idea of what the web actually contains.