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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."

9 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds Good But... by TMacPhail · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This sounds like a good plan but i dont think anyone would be willing to risk having their page show up lower in a search when someone was intending to find it. Plus anyone that finds the page in a search by accident is just a new potential customer.

    1. Re:Sounds Good But... by Krimsen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Agreed on all points. I guess this concept of nonwords really is kind of dependent on people putting some effort towards something that doesn't immediately benefit them. Eventually "What goes around, comes around" and if eveyone uses the non-words, searches will become better. However, I'm not so sure that people are willing to put effort into something that they won't see return from right away.

    2. Re:Sounds Good But... by jaavaaguru · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If David, Michael, Cathy and Andrea were paying per megabyte for the bandwidth used by their site (for instance if they required what some ISPs consider to be premium services such as ASP or PHP) they would not want everyone who was looking for DMCA information to view their site, since that would most likely more than double their bandwidth consimption. With a frequently searched for word such as DMCA being used as a nonword for their site, they are both saving their own money and the performance of their ISP's network and servers. Another example would be if someone's surname is the same as that of a commercial organisation. They do not want all of that organisation's customers wandering into their site by accident.

      --
      Follow me
  2. How about this? by NitsujTPU · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just shitlist any site that is obviously reaching for hits? If a porn site has the words "Alan Turing" in its metadata and doesn't mention anything about Turing later in the site, list them as not being allowed to participate in your search.

    Hell, an engine that did that would almost be useful.

  3. mod_rewrite is your friend by Dr.+Awktagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well it's not as good/effective an idea as what this fellow is suggesting, but you can have a lot of fun with people based on their Referer fields. for instance, use it to just bounce them back to their queries, or bounce them to a different query (one for porn sites is always fun), or bounce them to a more relevant page, or fuck with them however you like. If you've ever had to set up Apache to block people from linking your images, you already know how to do it.

  4. I can see it now... by dun0s · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Porn sites who promote (through a variaty of means) the words "free, porn, sex" and the like and then demote "pay, fee, membership, credit card".

    This proposal will not make the indexing of sites more reliable. If anything it will add to the common confusion associated with meta keywords. Yes it is quite a nice idea in theory but I can't see anyone wanting to exclude words from being searched. The main point in the proposal was that the author felt guilty about pulling in people who had entered search terms that appeared on his page. One would ask why he is publishing information on the internet if he doesn't want people to look at it. A better solution would be to get people to use search engines properly. As an example I will use the stalking on the internet term. If people put these words into google and come up with his page then prehaps they should have modified their query to something like "stalking on the internet" and they may not have found his page. On the other hand if his page contains the phrase "stalking on the internet" it migh be just what the seaker was looking for.

    To this proposal I say nay. or prehaps oink.

  5. Re:The Semantic Web by Alomex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Surely this kind of issue is what Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C is trying to address with the Semantic Web.

    Indeed, but how close are they from achieving anything of significance? Ai has been working on a Universal Onthohology for ages and gotten nowhere.

    The fact that Berners-Lee agree that it would be a "cool thing to have" does not make it any more likely to happen (by the way, TB-L first proposed the semantic web almost five years ago).

  6. This is backwards by Nick+Arnett · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Picking out the "irrelevant" words is much harder than creating tags that contain the most relevant ones, which is the main point of meta-tags. Most of us have brains that are trained to pick out what is important, not the opposite, so few people would bother to implement this. Language is hard, computers are dumb and few people have been willing to "explain" language to them to make search smarter. In other words, nothing like works on a significant scale if much effort has to go into it. Tagging important words can be semi-automated with summarization software, which will accomplish much more in terms of relevancy ranking than tagging the ones to ignore. And by the way, this proposal misunderstands robots.txt. The point isn't to conceal the existence of pages, it is to tell *robots*, not people, to stay away from them. (I'm the owner of the mailing list for it.

  7. Re:That's not going to help bandwidth by Kanasta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, unless the same Disney lovers use filtering software, which probably won't be incredibly impressed by the number of banned words in your HTML...