I'm not saying that Alta Vista isn't a powerful search engine. It
most certainly is. As a computer scientist, I, too, can quickly revise the
query to something similar to yours. In fact, I sometimes claim that the
only thing my PhD really means is that I know how to use libaries REALLY
well. ;-) But, your typical Internet user has never had a course in Boolean
logic.
What started this thread is the observation that smarter indexing
could result in better query results. Search engines that understand the
difference between a text word, a title word and an HTML tag will invariably
return better results for simple queries than one that doesn't. Do you
disagree with this conclusion?