Here’s another question for you search engine users. (Sorry, this one’s not as fun as the heinous pornspam question, but at least that gives me an excuse to say ‘heinous pornspam’ again.)
Let’s say you send a query to your favorite websearch engine. How often do you find yourself having one of the following two reactions?
“What lame results! They’re all X pages!” (Where X is anything: news articles, blogs, heinous pornspam, product pages, wikis …) [Let’s call this reaction lame-all-the-same]
“What lame results! A total grab-bag of random stuff, when I wanted X pages!” [Let’s call this reaction lame-not-the-same]
Let’s make it more poll-like, and give four choices:
a) When my search results suck, they’re more often lame-all-the-same than lame-not-the-same.
b) When my search results suck, they’re more often lame-not-the-same than lame-all-the-same
c) My search results often suck, but never in a lame-all-the-same or lame-not-the-same way.
d) My search results never suck.
Your replies will be held in the strictest confidence, unless of course someone comes along and reads them on this blog.
Tim Converse 
(A), I think.
(A)
Uh… not to be “different”, but I’m voting B. It often takes me a long time to work out what type of domain each result is coming from, but a lot of them are lame. I suspect others may be using a different search engine though…
Since we’re talking about search engine lameness though… can I mention my current major frustration with Y! Search? I hate hate hate getting results that do not have the search term IN THE PAGE ITSELF. I suspect this problem is worse with terms that have higher emotional weight (e.g. “shitcanned”) because there can be a big disparity between a straight news story and a bunch of links that point to it with a term of oppobrium that implies a judgment. That emotional gap never fails to disturb me, and make me think there’s something wrong with the search engine.
I am overwhelmingly a (B)
But my roommate is an (A)
It’s (A) all the way.
Pedro