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

How about this?

[NitsujTPU]

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.

mod_rewrite is your friend

[Dr. Awktagon]

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.