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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log If Big Brother is watching you, watch him back - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K What sucks about cyberspace? Counter the abundance of Internet hype with some whining and complaining in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Get the scoop on hot start-ups at barnesandnoble.com ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Microsoft on Microsoft By Karlin Lillington How does the software giant spin its own history in its reference products? (12/18/98) Pod people By Janelle Brown Peapod, the online grocery service, sounds great -- but can it deliver? (12/17/98) Boon or boondoggle? By Nicholas Confessore The E-Rate subsidizes Net access for schools and libraries -- and your telephone company wants to kill it (12/16/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Bill Gates and Bill Clinton -- prisoners of Lawyer World (12/15/98) Internet censure-ship By Janelle Brown Can the Censure and Move On Web site make a difference? (12/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

Yes, there is a better search engine While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire. - - - - - - BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | I don't know about you, but I simply cannot get excited about the much-ballyhooed arrival of Go.com -- Disney's new (and still "beta-testing") entry in the portal wars. Just what the world needs: another Web site that unites directory listings, news, weather, stock quotes, movie reviews, free e-mail, shopping and other online functions on one ugly-as-sin Web page -- one that looks and behaves remarkably like its popular competitors. Go.com isn't breaking any new ground -- unless you value the prominent horoscope function on its home page, a device intended chiefly to collect visitors' birth dates for marketing purposes. As a Web portal, a site designed to be users' first daily stop for all their online information needs, Go.com retreads ground that has been thoroughly trampled by the existing portals such as Yahoo, Excite and Lycos, Netscape's Netcenter, AOL.com and MSN.com. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Salon's book reviews will be featured content in Go.com's book area.) In 1998 we saw such portals elevated by Wall Street traders into the standard-bearers of the new digital economy. These companies' future prospects for audience share and e-commerce revenue were expected to be so vast that investors blithely ignored their meager or nonexistent profits and bought their stocks at prices sane observers considered ridiculous. I'm not an Internet investor myself, and I don't care much whether Wall Street's love affair with portals is consummated in a bath of riches or sours in some imminent bubble-bursting market correction. But I am an Internet user. And I resent that today's portals are so obsessed with fine-tuning their demographics and matching every dubious feature their competitors offer that they are doing virtually nothing to improve the service at the heart of all their businesses: helping us all find stuff on the Web. Most of the portals have the eyeballs -- the site traffic -- that make them potentially successful businesses because they started as search engines. But in the three years or so of the commercial Web's evolution, during which the number of indexable Web pages has mushroomed, these search engines have made only the smallest improvements to their technology. When you conduct a general search on a broad term like, say, "President Clinton," you never know whether you'll actually find the White House Web site -- or some homely page chronicling an eighth-grade class trip to D.C. (Infoseek does a decent job returning the Oval Office site at the top of the list, but Excite sends you to an impeachment poll on Tripod and the Paula Jones Legal Defense Fund -- the president's page doesn't even make it into the first 10 results. Hotbot's top result is a site called Tempting Teens -- "All the Kinky Things that make our Government what it is.") This is an everyday problem familiar to anyone who uses search engines regularly. So here's some good news for us -- and bad news for the big portals: There is a better way to build a search engine. And a Silicon Valley start-up company with the unlikely name of Google.com is showing the way. - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T__P A G E .|. Amazing -- a search engine that actually works