[mkramlich]

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.