Trimming your Search Engine Listings

It happens to everyone at some point. You feel you're coming down with something; there's a rash somewhere; or you get strange stabs of pain; whatever it is, you first instinct is usually to fire Google up to see what kind of information you can gather about your symptoms. So you type in a few short words trying to sum up your symptoms into a search query and you hit Enter. A fraction of a second later, you're looking at the first dozen or so search engine listings that Google has come up with. The only problem is, that you are painfully aware of how after the first dozen, there are literally hundreds of thousands of other results that you'll never be able to get to. While Google is quite good at making sure that the first few search results are usually relevant, often, for searches involving obscure material, the first page may not cut it. And that's especially so if you have the misfortune of having your search query call up content farm material. For health-related advice, you usually get simplistic 500-word articles that tell you that you probably need more vitamins C. How do you get past all the garbage that comes up, and get to the ones that matter?

Google may be very good with common searches. With obscure ones, it usually has a hard time coming up a totally meaningful set of search engine listings. Meaningful search results aren't just about an algorithm that can tell what makes sense, apart from what doesn't. They also happen to be about getting around the efforts of thousands of talented experts who work to game the algorithm. They call it search engine optimization - a way to not let the search engine algorithm do the best job it can. Being able to get meaningful search engine listings usually comes down to who has the upper hand of two parties who battle it out - the SEO experts or the search engine programmers. Both keep tweaking their technique till the cows come home trying to achieve whatever it is they wish.

Google estimates that the Internet is now 1 trillion web pages (not websites) large. There are all these creators of these webpages trying to game one or two of the top search engines. And the search engines need to stay on top of what all those millions of SEO experts are doing to try to bring some order into it all.

To succeed where Google and Bing seem to have failed somewhat, a new search engine called Blekko is trying a new tack. Even if there are 1 trillion pages on the web, experts estimate that at best, there could be a couple of hundred million webpages that are actually visited by people. The rest just sit there hoping to fool people into visiting them once or twice. The idea that Blekko has is that they could get volunteers to manually look through the Internet and identify websites that could be useful to people. And then, when people search on Blekko, they'll only see results from those pages. They won't see anything from the whole Internet. It'll kind of be a Huffington Post way to search. It could work.