December 2, 2001

8:01 PM

anti-thesaurus
unhappy with web users who are unnecessarily drawn to your site in the pursuit of non-existent content? does it bog down your bandwidth? solution? write a metadata tag that specifically excludes certain terms from search engine hits by the simply defining them as non-words.
posted by bwg (10 comments total)

Makes perfect sense to me, too bad it doesn't actually work . . .

hence:"A Proposal For Improving Internet Search While Reducing Unnecessary Traffic Loads"
posted by jeremias at 8:12 PM on December 2, 2001

It's an interesting idea, and bears futher thought. I was wondering why I was experiencing deja vu reading the Hastings' article, until I remembered that I read about it on the searchenginewatch.com newsletter searchday a couple of days ago, discussed as "anti-optimization."

It sounds though, like Nicholas Carroll is suffering an embarassment of riches in terms of traffic to his webpages. I'm certain that there are many who would gladly face this problem, and not consider it a problem but rather an opportunity.

Also, if he wants to save storage space on his hard drive from pages he visits, he should just make his browser's cache file smaller.
posted by bragadocchio at 8:46 PM on December 2, 2001

::sigh:: i guess it'll be a while then until people stop coming to my site after searching for "gay amish porn" on google.
posted by lotsofno at 8:47 PM on December 2, 2001

Yes, but they will probably find this page for that search term now too. Imagine trying to define meta nonword tags for a community weblog?
posted by bragadocchio at 9:38 PM on December 2, 2001

But I find it amusing that my most common search terms are "Jocelyn Wildenstein" and "Christina Aguilera Dee Snyder."
posted by Su at 9:58 PM on December 2, 2001

but if we did have a thread here focusing on gay amish porn it would probably be the best resource of it on the web. in that case you wouldn't want to restrict out searches for gay amish porn.

not for nothing, everyone go link to this thread on your personal sites using the phrase gay amish porn and check google on wednesday for it.
posted by palegirl at 11:21 PM on December 2, 2001

Why wait?
posted by y2karl at 11:30 PM on December 2, 2001

I thought it took Google a month to find something.
posted by bunnyfire at 1:16 AM on December 3, 2001

yup, there i am at the very top for this ridiculous thread.
posted by lotsofno at 5:38 AM on December 3, 2001

The search for toboggan porn continues apace.
posted by rodii at 5:54 AM on December 3, 2001