I have a simple, rule-of-thumb test for a new search engine to see how it performs. My test, of course, doesn’t test all features, but it does test an important one. Here’s the test: There’s a small, rural town near San Francisco called Gilroy. It’s a random small town for this test’s purpose. Try searching any search engine for:
Gilroy hotels
See what you turn up (or substitute your own city of choice). Google is crammed full of BS fake ad sites for this search (and has been for years). A long time ago on Google this search would pull up useful information from personal websites about good hotels in the area.
The recently re-released site Ask.com provides a somewhat more credible set of results, but still plenty of fake ad sites.
In my opinion, until somebody cracks the BS ad site problem, our search engine technology is really just incremental. As far as “narrowing search results” on ask.com - that doesn’t seem like what the feature does. It seems more like a semantic prompt. In this case, it asks if I would like to run a search on “City of Gilroy.” Note this doesn’t narrow my search of Gilroy hotels, but replaces it completely, giving me (useful) results about the City of Gilroy in general.