[Buddha-l] Search engines [was: Religious violence, Buddhist violence and spelling]

Thu Jan 21 10:44:28 MST 2010

On Jan 21, 2010, at 12:45 AM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

> For single terms that hit count it more useful (the word should appear 
> somewhere on the page, though that is not always the case -- on pages where 
> the search term does appear one possibility is that the webpage designer hid 
> that word, and likely others, in invisible text that google's webcrawler 
> will nonetheless detect, all for the devious purpose of getting you to enter 
> their site and to get listed high-up in the google hit hierarchy.

That is correct. Books on webpage designing nowadays often have a chapter on how to increase one's Google hits. One way is, as Dan said, to put keywords in in the <head> of an HTML document. There are numerous other tricks people use to make sure their web page rises to the top of a Google search. There are people who get paid big bucks to make sure that their customers' pages appear at or near the top of a Google search.

On using Google effectively, I saw a book in the city library last year and checked it out (and even read the darn thing). It's called "Google for dummies" and is written following that maximally irritating for-dummies formula that all books in the series have, but does (like most books in that series) have excellent tips of how to use Google to make sophisticated searches that have the effect of filtering out unwanted hits. The book covers not only Google search engine but Ask, Altavista, Lycos, MSN, and Yahoo! It also has advice on how to use Hotbot, a sort of meta-engine that gives the user instant access to three different search engines from one page. So you can do a search from Hotbot using Lycos (a very good engine) and compare the Lycos results with the MSN or Yahoo! results with a quick click of a button. Each engine has its strengths and weaknesses, and each is good for a different sort of data. The best way to get a feel for them, of course is to use them all on a variety of search items and see what you get.

Try tying "Buddhist discussion forum" (without the quotation marks) in these engines and see what you get:

http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.ask.com/
http://clusty.com/
http://ixquick.com/
http://www.hotbot.com/

My favorite sexperiment was to search for "George W. Bush" "Antichrist" (WITH the quotation marks). My favorite result for that search, one which appeared on every search engine, is the following article about allegations that the Pope thinks George W. Bush may be the Antichrist. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0MKY/is_9_27/ai_108881880/

What does this have to do with Buddhism, you ask? Silly question.

Richard 