To illustrate what he meant, I'll give an example. Assume someone entered a search, "What are the best dog breeds?". Would it be easier to:
1. write an automated system which could dynamically deduce what the answer to this question is and/or what pages to return in the results, based on dynamically crawling the web, indexing, analying link structure, ranking, filtering, etc.
-or-
2. have a human write an answer to this fricking question and enter it into the database as the result for this search
hint: pick 2
it doesn't scale up to handle bazillions of different searches, but on a smaller scale and in tactical cases it's far simpler and easier to implement and can produce better results.
1. write an automated system which could dynamically deduce what the answer to this question is and/or what pages to return in the results, based on dynamically crawling the web, indexing, analying link structure, ranking, filtering, etc.
-or-
2. have a human write an answer to this fricking question and enter it into the database as the result for this search
hint: pick 2
it doesn't scale up to handle bazillions of different searches, but on a smaller scale and in tactical cases it's far simpler and easier to implement and can produce better results.