Ok, I agree Keyword Search does suck and so does TechCrunch - Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? more or less, but I didn’t need that post to tell me that keywords search sucks - I have been saying that for the last 5 years.

Sure, with 100 times more content now than when Google first emerged what worked then, doesn’t work nearly as well now - but the problem is more fundamental - keywords search sucked when it first came out - people were just so enamored with search - anything that worked better than what was in place was deemed a “revolution”.

The problem is what people say and what they really want are usually two different things. Often, what your are searching for isn’t what you really wanted, anyway - you just decided this keyword (label) would take you to what your looking for. Sometimes it still works - but most of the time, it’s hit and miss, with miss happening more than hit; that’s why the average search session is several minutes (I wrote about this recently) and includes 7 or 8 searches in that session (maybe 30 minutes).

If search were so great, why does it take 7 or 8 times to settle on a query (and either get what you want or give up)? Because …… what we want and the object of that desire are often at odds -they are not described the same way.

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