Google? Not.

So I'm going to complain again. I've been taking a social network analysis class this quarter that deals with, predictably enough, the formation and evolution of social networks (!) and how these have recognizable patterns which make up the complex structure of the analyzable nature/mechanics of social interactions... blah blah. Anyway. What I'm about to complain about has nothing to do with this class. It has to do with the fact though, that, while learning about this complex science of networks, a science that apparently underlies the functioning of everything in the world, including your grandma, we also learned about the structure of web networks, and coincidentally, how they are connected to each other by short pathways, like people, eerily similar to the 6 Degrees of Separation theory, and how, because of everything being connected to everything else, everything being relatively close to everything else by virtue of these connections, analyzing and understanding networks permits us to locate central actors in these networks by virtue of an iterative assessment of the connections they possess, which allows central actors to be identified fairly easily within any network (including the web).. which, in turn, makes search engines like Google be able to identify relevant pages by degree of their connections to other relevant pages (cross-citations, links to this page, etc) which makes Google a very efficient (dare I say miraculous) way to look for everything from "green warts on your left elbow" to "song stuck in my head" to "why doesn't anyone love me?" and get pretty much the answer you were looking for. Its like.. God. Anyway. The reason I'm raving about Google and ranting the length of a short novel is to then, in turn, express my befuddlement and bewilderment with the Northwestern search engine. WTH is up with that thang? After years of having examples of highly efficient search engines, WHY have they not been able to engineer/copy the functioning of something that actually passes for a search engine and not, well, a search thwarter? Why when I look for, say, "jstor" it gives me a list of a zillion legal articles that have probably been extracted from jstor but no way to just ENTER jstor. let's try again: "jstor ONLINE ACCESS". Nope. But do you want legal services? "shuttle service" you mean CTA transportation? "spac hours" Learn to Sail at Northwestern? "theater building" I actually got martial arts training and the Kenneth D. Forbus Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, Fundamentals of Computer Game Design. True story. Don't even try anything as complex as a full question like "where can I get food?" You'll starve before it gives you the address of the building with a cafeteria thats prob 2 blocks away. It just don't work man. They are many ways to locate "centrality" in a network, including reach, degree, betweenness, eigenvector (the iterative approach described above) which, as explained, easily detects "hubs" and/or centers of high connections and activity, aka prominent pages.. which if used in this context would save us all a lot of trouble. Whoever designed this to find things in the web really needs to learn more about how this web actually WORKS... but that's just, like, my opinion.