in reply to The Web is Set Up All Wrong
The alternative at Blekko is to add sites you trust to a slashtag and then search with that - like "windows azure" /sharpdevelop. It has the disadvantage that you don't get hits from sites that you didn't already know about. You can use a previous search (like the first one) to build a slashtag, so maybe a combination will help.
It's definitely not perfect, mostly because Blekko's relevance isn't always quite as good as Google's, especially with multi-word queries, but it can be a lot better in many cases - and in highly-spammed categories, Blekko tends to do better, because they use an algorithm that detects highly-spammed searches and adds a pre-generated slashtag automatically.
Again, I used to work there, and I think they've done some really cool stuff. And it's Perl, too. :)
Google does seem to be attacking the problem, but not as aggressively as Blekko - mostly, I think (this is all my opinion, not Blekko's or Google's, or any other employers - I don't speak for or work for either of the search engines) because there's a tension between providing good results and dropping sites that make Google money, however skeevy that money is. At the moment, Blekko doesn't have that tension, as they're not selling ads nor do they have sponsored results. There's no impetus for them to do anything except to try to provide better results than Google does to lure traffic away from Google. When they finally do add monetization, it will be interesting to see how (and if) they manage to keep their anti-spam stance as aggressive as it now is.
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