The State of Hawai’i Demands a New Search Engine by Matthew Hurst.
Matthew writes:
We will soon be embarking on a short trip to Hawai’i. Naturally, I’m turning to search engines to find out about the best beaches to go to. However, it turns out that this simple problem – where to go on vacation – is terribly under supported by today’s search engines.
Firstly, there is the problem with the Web Proposition. The web proposition – the reason for traditional web search engines to exist at all – states that there is a page containing the information you seek somewhere online. While there are many pages that list the ‘best beaches in Hawai’i’ as the analysis below demonstrates these are just sets of opinions – often very different in nature. An additional problem with the Web Proposition is that information and monetization don’t always align. Many of the ‘best’ beaches pages are really channels through which hotel and real estate commerce is done. Thus a balance is needed between objective information and commercial interests.
Secondly, beaches are not considered local entities by search engines. While the query {beaches in kauai} is very similar in form to the query {restaurants in kauai} the later generates results of entities of type
while the former generates results of entities of type . While local search sounds like search over entities which have location, it is largely limited to local entities with commercial intent. Finally, there is general confusion due to the fact that the state of Hawai’i contains a sub-region (an island) called Hawai’i.
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As you may have guessed, had Matthew’s searches been successful, there would be no blog post.
How would you use topic maps to solve the shortfalls that Matthew identifies?
What other content would you aggregate with beaches?