Dale Stubbart

Improving Search Engines

Suggestions for Improving Search Engines and some tips for how you can search better.

First, let me offer a couple of ways that you can improve your searches. Keywords is number one. Google recognizes a number of keywords. Type convert 1 mile to km. Google recognizes the keyword convert and offers you the converted result. flight is another keyword. Follow it with the from and to cities or airport codes. Weather is another keyword, just follow it by the city. You can type in a formula and Google with do the math for you. Googling google search keywords won&';t help you with this. It will think you&';re interested in key words for Google ads.
Exclude Words is number 2. At the end of your search phrase, enter - before a word to exclude results with that word. like -movie or -movie -book.
More Keywords. Here are more things to try.

So much for tips for using the current technology. Now for some feature that I think somebody should incorporate into a search engine.
#1: Remember my choices. Let me rate results by domain. Perhaps all sites start out rated at 7. There&';s an entry box beside each result which let&';s you up or down it&';s rating for yourself. When I search for Oracle related things, I want to see things by three people: Burleson who has a couple of websites, AskTom, and That Jeff Smith. I would rate those domains as 9 and they would appear at the top of my search results. StackOverflow and other Forums, I would downgrade to 5, maybe to a 3. I might still want to see those results, but later. They should still appear in the first 3 pages of results (30 results). Any website that doesn&';t let me out, I would rate at -1, never want to see it again. This is all simplistic, but you get the idea. If I&';m searching for Oracle, I want to see results from those three guys, even if they&';re not in the top 30. If a word like forum appears in the domain, I want to rate it -1 not matter what the domain name is.
#2: Allow me to tie that ranking to a keyword at times. If I&';m not searching for Oracle related things, I probably don&';t want to see what those three guys think. Google probably won&';t show it to me, so that&';s not the best illustration. But there are times when that could come in handy.
#3: Suppose that now, I&';m searching for a human oracle, rather than the software. Maybe I&';m more interested in the company or the stock price. I can type the stock symbol into Google, like I know what that is. What I&';d like to have is some way to quickly enter these, yet the search engine knows the difference. Perhaps this would be letting me create my own keywords.
#4: Let me check 3 or 4 results. Then show me those results side by side, so I can compare and then choose one.
#5: Give me a way to state preferences on my profile. These are the types of results I&';m likely to be interested in. These are ones I don&';t want to see. This could be things like, always show me scholarly articles, never show me anything that&';s negative towards electric cars. I realize that keeps me from seeing both sides. But there are times, when I want to only see what I&';m interested in. So, maybe there&';s a time limit.

I don&';t think that&';s too much to ask. What are your thoughts for a better search engine? Who wants to develop this?

I also want a way to tell Google to forget my previous search request. I&';m on to something new. And I often want to search for not nearby. I want to search the world instead. Or maybe I only want to search online stores. But maybe I should stop at 5 requests. Maybe these others are asking too much.