> > The trick is that
> > someone looking for the information may have difficulty finding it even
> > with a web search tool. 2006010 documents match the query "FAQ" in the alta
> > vista Canadian < http://www.altavista.ca/ > index, I did not try the world
> > index.
Searching for +FAQ +news.answers reduces that to a mere (!) 36,937. I doubt
most newbies would think of the news.answers connection, though.
>
> Yes, the search engines need to do a much better job of indexing Usenet
> FAQ. Without Usenet, perhaps the search engines would have to follow their
> own process of judging which are worthwhile. Not that rtfm judges based on
> content, but I think the approval process itself weeds out a lot of people
> who aren't willing to follow through (for good reason). A similar process
> doesn't seem to exist on the search engines.
I suppose it's conceivable to try to contact the hierarchical portals (like
Yahoo) and see about working out some sort of blanket deal to include "all"
the FAQs somehow. Does this seem like a reasonable idea? We might be able to
work out some correspondence between the news.answers archive names and the
yahoo hierarchical structure that would make their job easier.
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