[bsder]

> Also is search considered a solved problem?

Ha, not only is search not a solved problem, I would posit that search is getting WORSE.

Computer knowledge is a particularly good example for how search is degrading with time.

Try to figure out how to do X on the Beaglebone Black (I presume the Raspberry Pi has a similar problem, but it's not something I'm that familiar with).

The problem is that the Linux implementation for the Beaglebone went from weird distribution (Angstrom) to mainline Debian Linux kernel 3.8 -> 4.4 -> 4.14 in a VERY short time so the number of links to new stuff stayed flat.

Consequently, the old Angstrom stuff almost always fills the initial search positions for quite a ways even though it's completely useless.

This is occurring in other things, as well. Stack Overflow, for example, has no way to mark an answer as "This was correct 5 years ago but is now wrong."

Effectively, the web is becoming sclerotic and search engines are following it.

I REALLY miss old AltaVista's feature where it would give you a graphical representation of the clusters in your search so you could drill down into a less popular grouping. The fact that nobody has recreated this makes me wonder ...

[MaxBarraclough]

> Stack Overflow, for example, has no way to mark an answer as "This was correct 5 years ago but is now wrong

Not counting comments? What more could you ask for?

[bsder]

Candide would be proud of you...

What more could I ask for?

Which comment is the correct one? There are always multiple "No, that isn't correct, this is the one true way" comments. One posted 5 years after the flurry is unlikely to get many votes.

How about bad information not showing up in my search at all?

How about ageing out votes so it makes sense to come back to a topic and revote?

And this doesn't even account for the information that is simply wrong but nobody cares enough (or has enough karma) to fix.

Curation isn't always bad.

[MaxBarraclough]

> One posted 5 years after the flurry is unlikely to get many votes.

Interesting point - perhaps a hybrid scheme to decide the ordering of the answers, that balances upvotes and submission date.

It would need to be carefully tuned though - for some questions, answers will age badly ("What's the best way to do parallel stream processing in Java?"), but for others, they essentially won't age at all ("Why is there a small numerical error in this floating-point calculation?").

Perhaps it could be tuned by tag, as a means to estimate how the answers will age.

> How about bad information not showing up in my search at all?

You don't want the system to be overly sensitive to undeserved downvotes.

> Curation isn't always bad.

Of course, but traditional curation isn't on the cards simply because of scale - StackOverflow isn't like an academic journal - and we're whining about a system that works incredibly well.

Look at YouTube comments, or Yahoo Answers, and you see what a shitshow it can be when the Internet tries to have a conversation. It's a small miracle that intellectually worthwhile forums like this one can ever work. StackOverflow does a lot right.