Search Engines Need to Start Finding

Now, if I type something that I am more likely to be interested in, such as "saving for retirement", I get 24,400,000 results from Google, 6,160,000 from Yahoo and 2,551, 184 from MSN.

Great - somewhere in there is possibly something I would find useful. But where?

Search engine suppliers use algorithms to ensure that the most apposite results appear closer to the top of the list, but if the result I want is even in the top 1% of Google's solution, I still need to go through more than 250,000 results.

To give me just 100 to go through would require Google to be 250,000 more selective - and would such selectivity guarantee that I got the matches that I was searching for?

With the continuing growth of web content (75,000 new blogs a day, never mind anything else) this can only get worse.

The problem is compounded by the use of paid-for placements.

The top selections in many search engines are there because the company involved has paid money to try and ensure it is on the first page of searches that might be right for them.

However, most searches are too woolly to create a narrow set of results, which means that a lot of paid-for placements are presented wrongly and may push the right solution to page five or six of the search, generally beyond the attention span of most searchers.