Tuesday 29 September 2009

Search polluted by unrelated text

I'm a bit tired of my search results including irrelevant pages because of tag clouds, ads or article lists. This problem only comes up when I'm searching for obscure combinations of technology, like "Ubuntu nokia 6288 sync bluetooth" or "JasperReports eclipse Berkeley DB XML". If it's uncommon to find them written about together, chances are most of my results will be articles about one with unrelated links to the others.

I realise it's a near-impossible feat to filter out things like that, and I also realise that Google have done a tremendous job so far. It's just that it would be nice not to have to deal with it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may be one of only a few geeks with this problem.
PPS - So I doubt it's going away soon.

2 comments:

Miv said...

I can understand your problem but I think it is not as uncommon as you think.

Personally I understand it to be similar in type to the problem I have where I search for something particular looking for information on it as a product, only to return 10^10 pages of crap sites simply selling that product, or worse yet offering to sell it but regretting to inform me that they don't stock that item.

John said...

Yes, there's something definitely wrong with the web. We need search that can differentiate between types of content - commentary, sales, reviews - and can filter out fluff and filler for the most relevant results. It's a big step up, but maybe someday we'll get it.