Has Google stopped searching for answers?

Cyberclinic

It's an ambition of mine to become a verb. Ideally, "to Rhodri"would mean to pen vast tracts of moving prose, display superhumanmusical virtuosity, and be effortlessly charming. Sadly, it's notgoing to happen. It won't even come to mean "to moan about stuff",which is a better reflection of my personality. But Google managedit, the lucky so-and-sos, by creating the most efficient search toolthe internet had seen. It made its competitors look so laughablybloated and inept that we deserted them like they were traincarriages with a large, ticking parcel left in the aisle. Eventoday, with Microsoft's Bing doing all it can to challenge -including, say, dealing with Google copying its results - we'recontinuing to show loyalty to the search giant; more than two-thirds of the world's searches are handled by it.

But while Google spreads its wings and moves into areas beyondthe web, such as driverless cars and alternative energy sources,there's a growing murmur that it may have lost its mojo in the onearea it had unquestionably conquered: search. For a search engine tosucceed, all it has to do is give us the results we're looking for;it does so by taking our often vague search terms and using analgorithm to assess which websites in its index we might beinterested in. But Google's search engine is so dominant -effectively the gatekeeper to the internet - that the battle to beatits algorithm and push websites to the top spot for various searchterms is incredibly intense. Search engine optimisation is amultimillion-dollar industry and, in a sense, it's the scourge ofthe web, because it reduces the chances any automated system has ofcalculating how interesting a website really is. If Google losesthis battle, useless links rise up their listings, which is thecharge the company currently faces. Content farms churn out millionsof pages of drivel purely to lure in visitors via search engines,and then collect the associated ad revenue. And they're gettingbetter at persuading Google that they're fascinating websites thanGoogle are at realising that they're not. As one commentator put it,it's become a "tropical paradise for spammers and marketers".

This may be overstating things - Google does a good job undertrying circumstances, and it gets hammered when it attempts to makechanges; this week, it removed torrent sites from its instant-search feature - possibly at the behest of the music industry - onlyfor screams of "censorship" to echo around the web. But maybethere's a different approach involving curation. In the early daysof the web, sites such as Yahoo! would assemble links to websitesthat it deemed to be worth visiting, place them in folders such as"Entertainment" or "Pets", and we'd dutifully go and have a look.That seems laughable these days - though, in a sense, every link weshare on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon or Delicious is a kind ofcuration system. So how about combining a clever algorithm with acrowdsourced curation system to help to suppress the tidal wave ofspam links? Blekko.com, a new search engine, works on thisprinciple; we bestow our editorial approval on websites via aprocess they call "slashtagging", and spam links can be eliminatedin a single click. Additional tricks, such as being able to orderresults by date, make Blekko one of the most interestingalternatives to Google. Of course, if it ever becomes as popular asGoogle, a whole industry will swing into operation to try to ruinit. But I think we've got a while before that happens.

The world waited for 15 long, traumatic years for a new album byGuns N' Roses. When it finally arrived, back in 2008, it's safe tosay that the sheer weight of expectation led many people criticallyto appraise it as "a bit rubbish". The makers of the game Duke NukemForever are probably anticipating a similar critical mauling, whenthe game is released this spring, some 14 years after its firstannouncement. It's often cited as the premier example of"vaporware", a delicious term that neatly wraps up the failure of apiece of software to materialise promptly with our sneering doubtthat it will actually appear. You do wonder whether it might havebeen easier for its makers, Gearbox, just to abandon the wholeproject - especially when it started being referred to online as"Duke Nukem If Ever". But no, the controversial character returns on3 May. Honest.