Frustrated with Search Engines
Phil Stripling
: I've been trying to publicize my web pages on the net and I'm finding the
: system of search engines to be inadequate. The system of categorizing
: information seems to be faulty. Most are based on finding instances of
: key words in web pages. The more instances of a key word found in a
: document, the higher on the search list it gets. If you were to look for
: information on memory the top item on the search list is a catalog for
: memory chips. The catalog has hundreds of instances of the word
: 'memory' in it.
You might try using META tags, if you haven't already:
<html><head>
<title>Your title here</title>
<META name="resource-type" content="document">
<META name="description" content="Information on what your page is about">
<META name="keywords" content="CAD, CAM, all the other key words">
<META name="copyright" content="Copyright 1995, Your Company, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.">
<META name="distribution" content="global">
</head><BODY>
: Many are using key words such as 'sex' to get attention. This causes
: pages to have hundreds of instances of a key word. I've been told this
: is what is called a troll. Trolls are supposed to be bad netiquette.
: Unfortunately they are a necessary evil in order to get a message heard.
Uh, I wouldn't do that for a commercial page. You don't want to have
thousands of horny geeks sucking up all your web time so your customers
can't get to your site.
: Posting on newsgroups can invoke flame mail even when it is a related
: news item and totally unrelated items don't ever get flamed. I am not
: promoting spamming but carefully placed postings. It seems that the
: information presented may be threatening to those potential readers or
: newsgroup administrators.
:
I don't make my living off my site, so I'm negative about "carefully
placed postings." Some guy tried that here -- everytime someone had a
question, this person answered, and his product was the best solution.
He got _tons_ of flack and abuse. The "netiquette" solution seems to be
to answer questions without mentioning your product, but have your .sig
displayed at the end of all your posts. People get the message without
being hit over the head.
: I need better ways to get my messages across. I've thought of using
: interconnecting pages of related information but it is hard to get others
: to provide jumps.
Again, I don't have a commercial site, but people ask me for links, and I
ask others for links. I'd suggest that you do searches for your type of
website and find noncommercial sites where people would _love_ to have
cross links to get their traffic up. If you're trying to get cross links
from people who see you as a competitor, I think your less likely to get
them to link to your pages.
>SNIP<
: http://tribeca.ios.com/~compvent/compvent.html
: http://tribeca.ios.com/~compvent/cadstuff.html
: http://tribeca.ios.com/~compvent/cadvance.html
: http://tribeca.ios.com/~compvent/cadbasic.html
If you haven't tried the web announce newsgroup, try this: announce one
of the preceding pages every week. You'll get a month of postings out of
the four pages. I assume each is crosslinked to the others, so you'll get
people who have the opportunity to see them all.
Hope this helps.
--
Phil
PGP+ M+ E W++(+) U P+ w--