Why Are the Search Functions on Newspaper Web Sites So Poor?

(This was drafted on 12/07/08) In this morning's Washington Post I saw an article on a book called "Buyology", by one Martin Lindstrom. I wanted to read the article at my leisure, so I went online to look it up and email it to myself. I searched for "Buyology", figuring that would be sufficient. And I thought it was when I saw the results, it looked like I had a direct hit--the only result included the same photo that had accompanied the article. But when I clicked on it, it turned out that the link was only for the photo.

So then I searched the Washington Post site for "Buyology" and "Martin Lindstrom". This time I got a couple more results, including a review of his book from back in October, but still not today's featured article. My next step was Google News search: "buyology + washington + post". Bingo, first result.

I seem to experience similar behavior when I search within my local paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Except, if anything, it is worse. I haven't ever bothered to analyze what is going on, but many, many times I search for an article I saw in the last few days, and either can't find it, or it is buried very, very deep within a lot of goofy results.

There is a lot of speculation in the air about how endangered print newspapers are, and that the ones which will surivive are those that will find a good transition to the web. Given the difficulty they have executing the basics on the web, I have my doubts. Read Dave Winer's article "A Plan B for News".