"The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category

"The only way to combat this and return trust and quality to search is by taking an editorial stand and having humans identify the best sites for every category." There are billions of webpages. Who is going to do this review? Is someone honestly going to review http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4300234/how-might-union-find-data-structures-be-applied-to-kruskals-algorithm http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4300234/how-might-union-f... and put it in the category of "How Union/Find data structures can be applied to Kruskal's algorithm?"? No. The closest thing to a editorialized web is www.dmoz.org, and that hasn't been properly updated in years (and never will be) because it failed. Search has to be done with algorithms - there are just too many search queries to do it any other way. Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering stated that 20-25% of all queries made each day have never been seen before: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/udi_manber_search_is_a_hard_problem.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/udi_manber_search_is_a_....