Sex & the Search Engine

[Ernest Perez]

Jeffrey Beck wrote:
> 
> I would like to gently disagree with the following statement by  Alis
> Whitt
> 
> ||General search engines (such as HotBot, AltaVista) are becoming useless as
> ||information retrieval tools. I'd like to see a few search engines develop
> ||a "not" button which would eliminate all porn sites from the results list.
> ||This isn't a freedom of speech / offensive content issue; I resent the
> ||enormous waste of my time.
> 
> I find any generalization about search engines frequently incorrect
> simply because search engines can be valueable for one search and
> "useless" for another.  

I'll add my not-quite-so gentle disagreement. Please remember our
starting point: the Web is a basically big pile of garbage if you don't
have either 1) selective hierarchical menu access OR 2) search engines
to use in separating wheat & chaff. (Yeah, I know about the basic value
of hypertext; my doctoral thesis was on that topic.)

Part of the information professional approach is to use search engine
tools as they were intended to be used. Entering a single term
("superbowl" or two ("Windows 98") is equivalent to the fabled reference
interviews that start with, "Do you have anything on the United States?"
(or "taxes" or "automobiles" or whatever) Or of searching for "President
Clinton" on Lexis/Nexis.

What good is it going to do to get umpteen thousand hits on "superbowl"
or Bill Clinton? We all should know that the Web search engine genre is
pretty well tuned to the search algorithm of using multiple term natural
language, and delivering back large sets of results _ranked by
relevance_. 

Experienced searchers use search tools as they were designed to be used.
E.g.,
   superbowl super bowl "green bay" odds "point spread" handicap* -"Las
Vegas"

Okay, now you're gonna get something tuned to what you're really looking
for! And in most cases I bet you're not gonna get much porny in response
to that query. (Hmmm, then again, it might be worth looking at if it
DOES come up highly ranked on this search strategy.)  :-)

One of the respondents sez, "I'd probably go back to Readers' Guide in
print," but for <such & such personal search engine favorites>. Yeah, I
bet....

Cheers,
-ernest

Ernest Perez, Ph.D.//Oregon State Library//perez at opac.state.or.us
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