The Anti-Thesaurus: Unwords For Web Searches

Nicholas Carroll writes: "In the continual struggle between search engine administrators, index spammers, and the chaos that underlies knowledge classification, we have endless tools for 'increasing relevance' of search returns, ranging from much ballyhooed and misunderstood 'meta keywords,' to complex algorithms that are still far from perfecting artificial intelligence. Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases."

Comments

You're going to have to excuse me...

[Telek]

If I think that this is just a retarded stupid idea.

The people whose web pages are being thrusted to the top of the query lists are the people who are polluting the metadata and other tags for the sole purpose of getting their sites higher in the search lists

So lemmy get this straight: you want all good and honest people (who aren't causing the problem in the first place) to opt-out of common searches (which they'd never want to do), and this will thus remove the legitimate entries from the pool of queries, returning an even more polluted list from your search engine.

am I missing something here?

Although there are a few people who would be helped by removing absolutely irrelivant queries, the vast majority would actually suffer if they used this.