h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Google at first blush seems a wonderful thing. very quickly, though, one finds oneself drowning in a 'googleplethora' of irrelevancies.

A major part of the problem is poor categorization.

If one is searching for a product or service, for example, it would be nice to have categorization restricting the material coming up first to the appropriate categorization, 'product' or 'service'.

If one is interested in forum discussions or other commentaries relating to the product or service, or to specific providers, one should be able to bring that up independently in separate categories, rather than have it tossed in more or less randomly with material relating to the actual products, services and providers.

In practice, with a system like Google, categorization of this kind depends first on the opinion of the authors of the material. The same obtains with other categorizations important categories including things like literature divided into fact and fiction and categorized in appropriate genres.

Given that Google depends exclusively on keyword search without any effort to differentiate between 'keyword', 'author' and 'title', its frankly amazing that the system works as well as it does, and as it stands, it nontheless makes for a great deal of tedium sorting the relevant listings from the irrelevant.

So let's say one's looking for a product, touches the control button indicating product, fills in the name or type of product under keyword, and, interested in the literature on the given product produced by a given manufacturer, fills in the name of the manufacturer under 'author', title of the particular item if known, that should restrict the results to the manufacturers information.

One wants opinion on the product, one hits a control button indicating 'forum discussion', 'commentary', 'reviews', fills in the product name under keyword, bringing up the opinions one wants to study.

Like many people, I just don't have time to read everything that comes up in a Google search and wish that I did not have to study so many irrelevant listings searching for the ones I need.

Very well put. I know what you mean, since I spend hours doing that myself. Not for products, but for other kinds of information.

Google is far from the perfect search tool. Especially that irritating Instant Search, which I have to keep turning off.

I remember when the search methods were physical - card catalogs, bibliographies, etc. In spite of the near-instantaneous quality of the Google search, you still have to work hard at finding what you're looking for. Refining search terms, reading one site for more terms, then going back, reading page after page to weed out the false SEO, etc.

With a system like Google, it often depends on the authors of the information to categorize it.

An automatic feature automatically categorizing forum discussions probably can be done on a 'batch' basis, but might be more easily said than done.

I was rather surprised the first few times I found items I'd written to forum discussions or conversational threads coming up on a Google search.

Yeah. It's a good thing they do, too - I learn a lot from fora. I'm glad ours show up.

That's going to one of our projects h2g2 - improving our Google presence through better tagging. Maybe you can volunteer when the time comes.

Maybe.

Great, another victim - er, volunteer, maybe.

Meanwhile, at Google, since their most recent reorganization, they're placing increasing emphasis on advertising, so anything that improves utility for advertisers will probably go over well, if practical.

Yeah, it would, I'll bet. Advertisers do better if they reach their target audiences, so...