Comments on: Search engine madness http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/ Making it up as I go along. Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:34:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: homer jay http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/comment-page-1/#comment-221 homer jay Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/#comment-221 Information is information, plain and simple. You provide information on a subject, and a search engine leads people to it. Basically, you can't determine the intentions of someone typing "child p**n" into a search engine, and the search engine can't determine your intentions about having the subject matter on your site. All in all, I think things are working correctly. Information is information, plain and simple. You provide information on a subject, and a search engine leads people to it. Basically, you can't determine the intentions of someone typing "child p**n" into a search engine, and the search engine can't determine your intentions about having the subject matter on your site.

All in all, I think things are working correctly.

]]> By: Laurabelle http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/comment-page-1/#comment-222 Laurabelle Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/#comment-222 I tend to disagree. No, at the moment search engines don't know exactly what you're looking for, but why shouldn't they? Isn't the purpose of information retrieval to deliver all relevant documents and no irrelevant ones? Yes, search engines are working properly for their current functionality, but is that any reason not to aim for more precision? I think that in this case, Grokker's clustering technique is a fairly good one. Given the ambiguity of what people might be looking for, clustering will allow people to zoom in on what they want and not have to wade through all the rest. I tend to disagree. No, at the moment search engines don't know exactly what you're looking for, but why shouldn't they? Isn't the purpose of information retrieval to deliver all relevant documents and no irrelevant ones? Yes, search engines are working properly for their current functionality, but is that any reason not to aim for more precision?

I think that in this case, Grokker's clustering technique is a fairly good one. Given the ambiguity of what people might be looking for, clustering will allow people to zoom in on what they want and not have to wade through all the rest.

]]> By: Phil Ringnalda http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/comment-page-1/#comment-223 Phil Ringnalda Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://blog.niceperson.org/2004/01/15/search-engine-madness/#comment-223 While I was building myself a highly targeted trivia-answering program that did some scraping of search engine results, I was surprised to find that Teoma has become really, really good. The clustering is okay, sometimes, but probably because they aren't being targeted as much by SEOs, they generally seem to have better results, especially for competitive searches, than Google. And for some sites (including what I was after), they can be both deeper and fresher. It's one of those things that we used to teach and be taught, that's sort of fallen away in the last few years: never look at just one set of search results. If I wasn't so conditioned to searching by typing "google whatever something" in the address bar, I'd switch to Teoma first. In fact, I just switched the google bookmark keyword over to search Teoma, just to see how it works out. If it doesn't work, or I really meant "no, Google!" I can always try "nogoogle whatever". While I was building myself a highly targeted trivia-answering program that did some scraping of search engine results, I was surprised to find that Teoma has become really, really good. The clustering is okay, sometimes, but probably because they aren't being targeted as much by SEOs, they generally seem to have better results, especially for competitive searches, than Google. And for some sites (including what I was after), they can be both deeper and fresher.

It's one of those things that we used to teach and be taught, that's sort of fallen away in the last few years: never look at just one set of search results. If I wasn't so conditioned to searching by typing "google whatever something" in the address bar, I'd switch to Teoma first. In fact, I just switched the google bookmark keyword over to search Teoma, just to see how it works out. If it doesn't work, or I really meant "no, Google!" I can always try "nogoogle whatever".

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