Searching for Transfer

Posted At : October 7, 2008 8:00 PM | Posted By : Isaac Dealey
Related Categories: Crazy Talk

Am I the only one who's frustrated by trying to search Google for specific information about Transfer or Reactor? The names are short and snappy. They certainly do "pop". They also produce a freaking LANDSLIDE of false positives if you try and search for them. I find myself forced to add "ColdFusion" to the search terms to get any decent results. I imagine I would be similarly frustrated by "Hibernate" if I worked much with Java. The word "java" on the other hand is so rarely used to describe "coffee" that it's a non-issue. Go figure. :P

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Sana's Gravatar @ike
A sensible tip for searching ---- transfer "coldfusion" ----- anything in double quote means that search must have this term.
# Posted By Sana | 10/8/08 6:36 AM
Justin Carter's Gravatar I was recently in Tours, France. Google those two words, and more than half of what you get is information about sight seeing tours in France (not in Tours) or information about the Tour de France cycling race :) (Yeah search engines know better than me, they love to drop the "s" off the end of the word that I was searching for!) So yeah, I have shared your frustration (just not on programming related topics, recently, hehe), and I have found myself wishing contextual searching was a lot better... Why can't we say we're searching for a place, or a software package, or a discussion about a topic? To me it seems that part of searching has remained unchanged for quite a few years.
# Posted By Justin Carter | 10/8/08 6:37 AM
ike's Gravatar @Justin - I believe that's the intent behind the "semantic web". I was watching a youtube video that Rob Gonda posted the other day where a guy who works for Twine.com was talking about the purpose of the semantic web and saying that it basically is intended to provide that kind of context-richness you're talking about because the rapid growth of content on the web is soon going to make traditional keyword searching not very feasible. But he even said he sees the semantic web as a "stop gap" between where we are now and the point at which artificial intelligence becomes practical and will take over in place of the semantic web.
# Posted By ike | 10/8/08 4:07 PM
Justin Carter's Gravatar I watched that video too :) But I guess my point was more along the lines of the silly things we have to do with search terms today to get what we're actually looking for, when other kinds of filtering options would do the job now with existing data that search engines (probably) have.

In your case, you have to fudge the search by adding "ColdFusion" to the search terms. In one of my examples, if you were looking for "discussions" you could try fudging the search with the names of common forum / bulletin board engines or blogging engines, for e.g. I know I've searched for a particular discussion in the past, that I had seen but not remembered where it came from, by putting "phpBB" in the search terms :P But I'm sure Google has a fair idea if a site (or part of a site) is a forum or a blog or something else, it's just that we don't get a chance to interrogate that data at the moment. A *real* advanced search would be nice :)
# Posted By Justin Carter | 10/8/08 4:41 PM
ike's Gravatar @Justin - yeah, I can see that... and I could see google adding something like context:geo or context:discuss that might have the ability to make the results much better targeted than something like adding "phpBB"
# Posted By ike | 10/8/08 6:38 PM
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