Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Anti-Thesaurus: Unwords For Web Searches

Posted by timothy on from the these-are-not-the-words-you're-looking-for dept.

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."

2 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Proposal won't work: No incentive! by Ex+Machina · · Score: 4, Informative

    But if we could have kept search engines from returning it, that would have been even better. Since in our case the page was intended for internal use, we don't care whether anyone can find it from the Internet. Our real users know where to look for it.

    http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

  2. Re:How about this? by 21mhz · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is where the Google's PageRank(tm) system chimes in: an Alan Turing biography linked by half a hundred sites, each having own decent ratings, will be rated undoubtedly higher than a porn site that just listed "alan turing britney spears anthrax riaa cowboyneal" in their meta keywords and is linked by a handful among millions sites alike. Use the great cross-linking fabric of the Web, Luke.

    Disclaimer: I'm in no way associated with Google.

    --
    My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.