Computer: Web: Searching
Make irritating websites funnier   (+1)  [vote for, against]
renamed due to freefall

First; I know as much about building search engines as I know about Martian building codes. However, I use them a fair bit.

I suggest that someone (probably but preferably not Google) make a search engine that runs a simple grammar check on the words before and after those that you searched for in the resultant sites. This would ruin the fun of toerags who list thousands of popular (and mostly irrelevant) searches in order to get more hits.

free porn mp3 download nude ceiling fan marcos mantis stripper fire banana salad winamp frog paris hilton catapult pogo stick arse garden jordan microsoft helicopter vole walmart medicaid bush tiger bottle envelope tree sit selection of cheeses thumbwax google monkey aol dirt border mountain apple noel edmonds
-- stilgar, Jul 03 2004

Probably do-able, but I think then that those random lists of keywords which people use to attract search engines would suddenly become grammatically correct.
-- hippo, Jul 03 2004


while flying in my walmart helicopter to visit bill gates at microsoft, I like to look at free paris hilton porn. I especially like the stuff where she dresses as a stripper and uses a pogo stick to catapult herself and her monkey into a tree, where she sits and eats a selection of cheeses. Occasionally, I'll eat a banana and drink tiger brand apple juice from a bottlewhile listening to winamp and contemplating the bush administration's medicaid for border mountain frogs. If AOL would charge a dirt-cheap tax on their mantis salad, noel edmonds could have his thumbwax cleaned.

While that probably doesn't make much sense, it would make it past your filter.

bone.
-- Freefall, Jul 03 2004


I'm flattered to be associated with "selection of cheeses"
-- thumbwax, Jul 03 2004


The engine should come back with check boxes "(a.) Are you stupid, or (b.)Did you make a typographical error?" and perform the search accordingly. :D
-- bobad, Jul 03 2004


Make a browser plug-in for your own PC, to scan and filter the search results. You could fine-tune it ("no porn search engines", "only porn search engines", etc.), and share the processor load. As mentioned, you need more than just a grammar check. Some tests may be: Super-hyphenated web names, pages full of links, sites that trap you or dump to other sites, sites that pop up multitudes of ads, and sites that invite you to install spyware.

If this feature is added to a popular web search engine, junk web pages will hide their schemes better -- or pay to have their site unfiltered. Personal scanning software would be harder to elude.
-- Amos Kito, Jul 03 2004


I will remind you that in the early days of search engines, Yahoo hand constructed its index, with the result the search quality was extremely high. But of course, with the man-hours going into it, they couldn't keep up with the rate of new pages being added, so Google, with its automated and algorithmic approach, won out.

But Yahoo still has its hand-sorted index, so go browse under that if you want to avoid the spam pages.
-- DrCurry, Jul 03 2004


But doesn't google already return spelling corrected options?
-- bristolz, Jul 03 2004


yeah, this was inspired more by irritation than rational analysis. however, it was worth posting a dud to get [freefall]'s illustration of why it sucks. also, i didn't know that about Yahoo, so bugger the idea, the annotations are better.

by the way, 1 inch = 8.23157228 × 10^-19 Parsec
-- stilgar, Jul 03 2004


noel edmonds? Is he a spam problem?
-- gnomethang, Jul 04 2004


Grammatically correct filler already exists. I'll not post a link, but I've seen it scattered widely across the net.

What I hate more are those links portal pages that somehow make it to the top of Google when you're searching for some technical fact or bit of information. You wind up finding a list of half-dead/half-garbage sites that have no relation to what you were searching for! GRR!
-- smurfzilla, Jul 04 2004


A little thought to keep in mind about Google... their search engine does a lot more screening and sorting than meets the eye.

There is a great book called "Google Hacks". Take a look.
-- zigness, Jul 04 2004


What I would like to see is to have a "NOT" feature added to web search engines.
-- GenYus, Jul 04 2004


You can use a '-' in your searches which acts as a (sort of) NOT.
-- DrBob, Jul 04 2004


GenYus, compare a google for "Spears" with one for "Spears -Britney" From 10 million hits to 2 million.
-- reap, Jul 04 2004


GenYus, DrBob: Two operators I'd like would be a "name-search" operator and an "other-than" operator. A name-search operator would look for a proper name to occur in a number of forms, but would not be so vague as to find all pages in which both the first and last names appear.<p>

For example, a search for "John Q. Public" should match "Public, John Quincy" or "John Quincy and Emma Jane Public" but not a page which talks about "John Quincy Adams" and then, many paragraphs later, talks about "Boston Public".<p>

The "other-than" operator would be used to search for occurrences of a term which do not form parts of a more specific query. The most common usage would be with the concatenation operator, e.g. "Spy-Kids [otherthan] (Spy-Kids-2 [or] Spy-Kids-3d)" could be used to located pages about the first Spy Kids movie while avoiding most pages about the sequels. Unlike the minus operator, the [otherthan] operator would not eliminate pages which happened to mention the original movie and also mention the sequel.
-- supercat, Jul 05 2004


//Often a search delivers thousands of results. Reduce these numbers by explicitly excluding words.

Just put the - (minus) sign in front of terms that are not interesting for you:

Searching for fruits -lemons you will find all pages talking about fruits - but not of lemons//
this is what excite .co.uk has at the bott om of their web search page
-- andrew1, May 20 2005



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