Wednesday 8 November 2006

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My First Search Engine. Porn and spam sold separately.

Statistics show that 98.54% of the content on the internet is worthless dross, yet we still have to wade our way through it to get to the good stuff. Perfect example: whenever you search Google to locate a trustworthy review of a piece of tech gear you're considering purchasing, it spews out wads of irrelevant shopping spam sites which - purely by chance of course - contain the word 'review', even though no opinions, positive or negative, are imparted within their pages. Typically this fluff populates the first few pages of Google's output, pushing the genuine content deep into obscurity.

One workaround would be to identify a handful of reliable sources for each kind of information you require, bookmark and search them individually. Better still is Rollyo; a newish, startup web gizmo which provides the means to tailor your search results to suit your personal preferences. It does this by allowing you to 'Roll Your Own' categorised search filters. For instance, you could create a health 'Searchroll' by entering the URLs of up to 25 top-rated health-focused web sites, which when queried would only return content produced by these previously vetted sources.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A better idea would be a coordinated linked bookmarks system. Input your bookmarks into categories and the net feeds it around. To be honest I am startign to rely on Wiki for some of what was previously google stuff.

If done well it might even stop some of those boob enhancment and diamond blue pill offers I seem to get.

dreamkatcha said...

Good idea. Bookmarks are where most of the hand-picked sites for my custom engines came from so it would have been handy if Rollyo had an import feature to speed up the process.

Yes, the downside does seem to be that covering all your bases initially involves quite a bit of work.

Wikipedia is an amazing resource. I go straight there for all sorts of info gathering exercises, very often to research topics you wouldn't find in an ordinary encyclopaedia. If there's an article available to cover your search you can almost guarantee it will weigh up the angles objectively, and provide links to further details.