Then each went to his own home

Imagine you have a closet where you store all your documents. Each time you want to archive an important document you tell your closet: “put that under important”, a magic hand, coming out of the closet, takes your document and puts it into its immense pile of documents. The other day you are in a hurry to be on time to your next meeting. You need that important document from yesterday so you ask your closet: “please show me all important documents”. Then you hear printing and rustling in the closet until, after half a minute, 20 magic hands stick out of your closet, each one holding a document, some of your documents have sticky notes on it saying: “this is not filed “important” but it is similar to a document you filed important”, another sticky note says: “these are all the other categories you put your documents in” and every document you really filed “important” has got a sticky note on the number of coworker who filed this document under “important”. You say to your self: Tomorrow I’ll reanimate my pile “important documents” that was on my desktop before they put this silly closet into my office.

That’s the feeling that arises when I think of all the bookmark services out there that ought to file urls I somehow find notworthy so that I can quickly recall them afterwards: There’s too much clutter and the services are just too slow. Therefore I again begin to save my bookmarks at other places: In firefox or in some text documents lying somewhere on my hard drive (probably I should tag them?). (more…)

Now we have three big web search sites:
MSN Search, Google, Yahoo, while Microsoft’s MSN Search is the latest competitor.

What is the big difference between the three search engines?
Sure, there are different page ranks, according to google-watch there is

on average only a 20 percent overlap between Yahoo’s first 100 results and Google’s first 100 results for the same search

And ok, there are different sites they are searching through.
But why is MSN doing more or less the same thing with huge efforts what google has already done? Yesterday I wanted to search all swiss companies that use/develop semantic web. I can’t search for that! (if you know a site doing that, let me know!). Now what they do is a giant race and some small search will come and eat them all. Why don’t they invent some new? Never heard of Semantic Web? Sure they have! So why are they are doing the same thing again and again? I don’t get it.