Plenty, says Stibel, who earned a master's degree in cognitive and linguistic sciences from Brown University last year. The fundamental problem with search engines, he says, is not that they are bad. It's that people and computers communicate in completely different ways. People, often without realizing it, rely on context and the environment to help get their message across to others. But in an office setting, at a meeting of programmers, someone who mentions Java is more likely talking about a programming language.
People get the implied meaning.
By contrast, computers don't just get it. They don't have the luxury of knowing context. We believe that is the fundamental problem. The site taps into several different popular search engines to display results. Here's how it works.