Re: word spam

Ken Wadland (wadland@engsoftware.com)
Mon, 15 Apr 1996 23:56:21 -0400

>> Sadly, some index engines are incluing grammatically correct pages
>> that are not really pages. For example, use the Alta Vista engine and
>> look for "posix".

>posix AND NOT (posix.pl)

This still gets 20,000 hits!

Yes, you can correct this particular case with a revised query; but,
wouldn't it be nice if the search engines were a little smarter about the
context of the word in the document?

As another example, try searching for "HTML". AltaVista gets 900,000
matches. I have yet to find a query for documents about HTML which works on
any of the search engines. For example, excluding "(HTML)" excludes all
documents!

I had one heck of a time finding the RFC for HTTP because of this.