This Impenetrable Cloud

Posted 1 year, 10 months ago | Originally written on 27 Jan 2023

I have a growing dissatisfaction with search engines that I have resorted to relying on published curated content (e.g. books) for reliable knowledge. Increasingly, I find that search engines do not satisfy my queries though I’ll readily admit that I’ve resorted to reading quora pages, which are more attuned to addressing more challenging queries. Nevertheless, I feel that the volume of knowledge has grown so much as to make precise search engine results irrelevant except for obvious queries. For example, search engines excel when it comes to resolving technical queries “how do I do X…”). On the other hand, I’m very curious to find out whether political systems select for certain personality types so merely including political positional terms like ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ completely dominate the results as to render them completely useless. It seems to me that search engines are hopeless at such complex queries.

Well, maybe I just don’t know how to search…