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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."

3 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. Proposal won't work: No incentive! by dstone · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Proposal: there should be a metadata standard allowing webmasters to manually decrease the relevance of their pages for specific search terms and phrases.

    Okay, pretend I'm a webmaster. What's my incentive to have my page show up LESS in anyone's search results?!

    If someone didn't want my site, why do I care if they get it? And if someone wants my site, I don't want to take any chance with an "anti-thesaurus" that might end up excluding my site!

  2. Not even slashdotted by evil_roy · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I reckon his site can handle the superfluous hits.

  3. Re:Proposal won't work: No incentive! by dun0s · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Isn't this what robots.txt is for? You disallow all search engines apart from your own from indexing pages that you don't really think people outside your department will want to see. Think how long it would take to put excluded words into every page of your site when a single line in robots.txt would suffice :)