Right. Hear hear. People have been, since about 1975, saying "wouldn't
it be wonderful if search engines were intelligent." And every couple
of years, some little venture-cap-funded startup comes along and says
"HUZZAH! We've made search engines intelligent!" If you believe
in precision/recall [which might be useful if it could be measured]
the numbers show a discouraging lack of progress in the last 20 years
at making engines intelligent.
Not that we don't make progress... but mostly on user interfaces,
data structures & algorithms, feedback mechanisms, document strucures,
indexing efficiency, distributed search.
Why is all this? Because to be intelligent, the software would have to,
for an arbitrary web page, be able to discern what it's about. In a
multi-lingual fashion, at that. Such software does not currently exist.
Cheers, Tim Bray, Open Text Corporation (tbray@opentext.com)