Google has this thing called [link|http://answers.google.com/answers/|Answers] that they've had for years. Experts can sign up and give answers to questions and get paid for it. Google hasn't been ignoring this space - they've probably been doing it years longer than AQA. I haven't looked into the details, like whether the answer can show up on a SMS phone, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't.

There's no doubt that Google Search is slowly devolving into the way Altavista was near the end. At times 10^7 pages show up with little relevance to what I want. :-( It probably has a lot to do with Google's advertising model, since it seems that quite often the top hits I see are sites that are just aggregators of search results. But there are ways around these problems if you're smart in using Google's features.

Don't always automatically jump to [link|http://www.google.com|http://www.google.com] E.g. if you're looking for items to buy, you probably should use [link|http://Froogle.Google.Com|Froogle]. If you're looking for a recent news story, you should use [link|http://News.Google.Com|News]. If you're looking for a research paper, you should use [link|http://Scholar.Google.Com|Scholar]. If you're looking for a picture, you should use [link|http://Images.Google.Com|Images]. If you're interested in Linux, use [link|http://WWW.Google.Com/linux|Linux] (and similarly with a few other [link|http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html|SpecialSearches]). If you're interested in blogs, use [link|http://BlogSearch.Google.Com|BlogSearch].

There's always [link|http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html|Advanced Search], too.

It's all [link|http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=alpha_index.html|Google A to Z], if you dig a little.

I'm just a Google user. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who notices that [link|http://sketchup.google.com/|SketchUp] is available and it looks like an interesting tool. Win and OS X.)

There are sometimes, though, when one doesn't want search stuff to be kept track of. Especially if one would like to have personalized Google pages at several PCs.

E.g. some humor isn't appropriate for work, but is fun to keep track of at home.

I guess it would be possible to have several Google accounts, but then it can be easy to lose track of which is which...

Plus, there's the issue of - Do you really want Google keeping track of things in one place like that? It would make it much easier for an embarrasing [link|http://www.techweb.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CHEFV5UXQ2GM4QSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=191900799&site_section=700028|AOL MeToo]...

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who's selectively paranoid about such things...)