Re: FAQ presence on web search engines

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Cameron Simpson (cs@zip.com.au)
Thu, 12 Nov 1998 10:16:00 +1100 (EST)


On 12 Nov 1998, in message <199811112030.OAA16813@hueco-e.rsn.hp.com>
"Danny R. Faught" <faught@rsn.hp.com> wrote:
| I've noticed that the presence of my FAQ on the web search engines is
| abysmal. Do others have the same problem?

Well searching for "aus.motorcycles faq" in altavista did ok for me.

| My FAQ is in the rtfm archives, so it makes it out to all the
| automatic FAQ web archive sites, including faqs.org.

I have just submitted the faqs.org home page to altavista - perhaps it
didn't have it before.

| And there's an
| independent site that hosts the FAQ. So it's reasonable to think that
| the contents of the FAQ would be indexed on the web search engines.

They _do_ have to find it first, y'know.

| Is there a universal solution to the problem, perhaps convincing the
| web spiders to dig down deeper into faqs.org to get to the FAQ
| contents?
| When the engines do hit my FAQ, it comes out very low on a long list
| of hits, even though the keywords were specifically selected to target
| the FAQ. Is there any way we can get the FAQs to come out on top when
| the keywords lead to them, especially when "FAQ" is one of the
| keywords?

With altavista, try
+faq
or title:faq
or +title:faq
in the search and see if the hit rate improves. In fact, "title:faq" on
its own seems to pull up an amazingly noise-free list.

--
Cameron Simpson, DoD#743        cs@zip.com.au        http://www.zip.com.au/~cs/

30 years ago, I made some outrageous promises about AI. I didn't deliver. Neither did you. This is all your fault. - Marvin Minsky, IJCAI'91 (summary)



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