Sex & the Search Engine

[Shirl Kennedy]

Uh, I just typed superbowl.com into Internet Explorer's address box and hit
the mother lode.  Alternately, you can drill down in Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com/Recreation/Sports/Football__American_/Leagues/National_
Football_League__NFL_/Super_Bowl/

Shirl K.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ernest Perez <perez at opac.osl.state.or.us>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
Date: Friday, January 23, 1998 6:32 PM
Subject: Re: Sex & the Search Engine


>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
>-----------------------------------------------------------------
>Ancient weapons and hokey religions are no match for a good blaster at
>your side, kid.
>  -- Han Solo