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

PROLOG HELP!!!

[clinko]

Someone quick!, I have a program due in PROLOG in about 5 hours!

ok, I just need to convert a string to all caps so I can compare it to its reverse (simple palindrome program)

I've gotten everything to work except converting the string to all caps, or all lowercase, or finding a caseless compare statment. 1 of the 3 will work and save my ass.

Thanks for the help!!!

Domain names

[Breace]

On a related subject, I've been looking for a domain name that is a) easy to remember and b) does not generate a zillion hits if you type the name in a search engine. (and c) is not a silly long string of words).

It's funny how most people thing that common word domains are valuable, but forget that if you have a name that, when typed into a search engine, jumps out as the only result is pretty valuable too. Especially if it sounds like it is spelled.

Maybe not the best example, but since the 4 letter TLD's are practically all gone, I was going to register duxo.com. Unfortunately one of the many domain hogs got it the day I was going for it. :o(

I got an other one though, but it's not up yet so I won't tell what it is! ;o)))

It might help only minimally with spammers

[Billly Gates]

I use to have an account here on slashdot with an email address. I also had one at zdnet's talkback with my email address on it as well. I got constantly spammed and it annoyed the hell out of me. I read here on slashdot that spammers use bot machines running perl scripts which just read slashdot and zdnets posts for email addresses and then sends them to a database which spams them around the clock. Another really bad place is newsgroups. Sadly mostly pedophiles and pornographers just spam the hell out of anyone who posts on these groups thinking everyone uses them for just porn.

In the old days of the internet back when it was run by the government, you could be literally be expelled from using it if you ever did this. Now its a standard practice and many schools ban the newsgroups. This very fabric of how the internet got started and contains valueable learning materials. Why? Well thank these porn spammers! Boy, does that piss me off more then anything else. Anyway I think the indexing metadata is a good one for web searching. It will make searching for valueable data alot easier and give AOL users a reason to switch. You might hate AOL but the users I know who use it say everything is organized right in front of you at your fingertips. No searching needed. If you ever needed to do a search for something specific you can always find what you need immediately. This is quite difficult with the world wide web unless you know exactly where to look.