The Failings of Search Engines and Why Calendars on Blogs Are Handy
For Je’, since we talked about whether blogs should have calendars quite a while ago.
I had an experience today highlighting why search engines aren’t always the best route to take when looking for something on the Web. While updating some links on my blog, I noticed that one link didn’t go to the correct place on another blog. I used the search engine on the other blog to try to locate that post. Since I quoted what the author wrote, I used some of his text in my search. I got no results. (Yes, the search engine appears to be working.) The blog uses Feedster’s search engine, so I didn’t think Feedster would give me different results. I tried Google, since it indexes blogs fairly well. I couldn’t get any results for his blog at all in Google. Alta Vista returned only spotty results for his blog and couldn’t find the specific post I sought. Luckily, I knew from the date of my post roughly when he would have made his post, so I browsed through his blog’s calendar and found the post that way. I’m not sure why my search returned no results when the post was indeed still on his blog.
I look for examples of when search engines don’t provide desired results that another method will to use in presentations I give about using the Internet. I’ll try to remember to use this one in the future. I often go through a similar process with similar results when I search for news articles in specific news archives. If the search engine won’t give me good results, I’ll browse by date if possible.
