June 19, 2007
OU Search Engine
Idling with the OU search engine the other day, I thought I'd do a search for the simple term blog just to see what it turned up... Here's a link to the actual search query:
Hmm - how about the second results page?
Err...
"Oh, for goodness sake...!"
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....
Now I have nothing against Marc's blog, but for a "novice" searcher, this sort of results listing is, IMHO, completely unacceptable...
Although it's maybe handy for making a teaching point on our infoskills short course (TU120 Beyond Google)?
In particular, here's how a little bit of knowledge about search query construction helps matters - simply add a -eisenblog term to the search query to filter the results:
(Err, unless you are logged in to the OU intranet, of course, when the first two pages of results point to Search results - Elementaries - The Watson Blog....!)
In fact, this teaches something even more powerful too - the idea of subtractive (excluding) filters applied incrementally to a set of search results to exclude items that contain a particular result, as opposed to only pasing resulkts that necessarily include a particular search term.
Posted by ajh59 at June 19, 2007 09:20 PM