We need better search; we need better URLs

Two posts, slightly related, both interesting reads for the search user experience crowd:

• Howard Owens says newspaper sites need better search. Boy, howdy! I commented that we have to consider the de facto standards for search keyword matching and results display established in recent years by Google and now often imitated.
• Eric Enge, at SearchEngineWatch, quickly explains how URLs and search engine crawlers work -- or don't work -- together. You can read many white papers on this subject (and would need to get the details if you are a person in charge of implementing a URL strategy) but the gist of it is in this post.