Sex & the Search Engine

[Sheryl Dwinell]

At 07:39 AM 1/23/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Jan. 23, 1998
>
>This morning I attempted a standard AltaVista search on "superbowl."
>I queried for hits from 21/Dec/97 and later.
>
>For "superbowl" none of the top 5 sites had anything significant to do with
>this year's superbowl.  Two of the top five hits were sites offering
>subscriptions to nude picture archives.

Not to sound like a smart aleck, but it's 'Super Bowl' not 'superbowl' But
I did search for 'Super Bowl' and in the first ten results got 4 sex sites.
I took a look at the source of some of them and noticed one used the old
'color the font of the innocuous text that gets pulled up by the search
engine the same color as your background' trick. Adding 'football' didn't
seem to help much. Adding 'San Diego' to the search did return more
relevant results on the first screen, although the first hit was another
porn site. 

Personally, I've given up using the large search engines for topics that
are easily defined, like info about the Super Bowl. For something like that
I turn to the directories and news sites. I tend to use Alta Vista for
really complex, advanced searches.

>The upshot: Search engine results are becoming LESS valuable, and
>librarians who are finding, categorizing, and promoting useful, relevant
>sites are becoming MORE valuable.  Generally speaking, librarians are
>trusted by the public, and here is an opportunity to build on this trust.

It's a theory. *grin*

Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu