I work a lot via google, but sometimes you don’t find something because there is too much noise: you end up on commercial sites or on amateurish or pornographic ones. For example, look for a policy for internet use that contains provisions about (the prohibition of visiting) porn sites. A solution may be that you first search for security policy and within the search results for porn, but that is not possible with google.
Answer
The problem you describe is actually twofold. In order to find a site, search engines need to know that the site exists and that the site is ‘search engine friendly’.
Search engines use a variety of techniques to determine which are the most relevant keywords for each page they index. By respecting certain rules when laying out your site, you make it easier for the search engine. These rules are usually referred to as SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization.
A second problem is that search engines currently do not have the ability to understand the meaning of words. When you search for Madonna, the search engine doesn’t know whether you are looking for Madonna the singer or information for the religious figure Madonna. Because there are many more pages about the singer on the internet than about the religious figure, pages about the singer will be placed first in the search results.
A solution to this problem is the holy grail of search engines at the moment. As a user, you can only circumvent this problem by refining your search. If your search ends up in a different domain than what you had in mind, you can try to come up with keywords that are more specific to the information you are looking for and do not appear in the search results you already found.
Answered by
Axel Hallez
Informatics (databases)
http://www.ugent.be
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