Text search is failing
I’m trying to find out if Sony’s MBW-150 watch will work with my iPhone. I won’t bore you with specifics but this is a bluetooth watch that allows you to play, pause, and whatnot your music and notifies you of text messages and calls that are coming in.
So I fire up google as usual and search for MBW-150 iphone. This has turned up a few forum posts regarding this watch and the older ones that I’ve found say that it can’t be done. That’s fine. To me that’s a valid search result.
What I’m having a big problem with are mostly blogs. They’ll review the watch and the review contains no information about iPhone compatibility. Why are these reviews showing up in my search results then? Doing a quick scan of the page you can see that some kind of link containing the word iPhone is on the site’s side bar. This is the same kind of crap that went on a decade ago when the web was still fresh. You would see (and sometimes still do) a ton of small text at the bottom of every page that contained a jumble of words.
I’ll try to show you what I’m talking about here. Open this link http://bit.ly/tiSfB hit control + F and search for iPhone. At least for now there are tons of references to iPhone but none are actually in the content of the article.
We need a search engine that just looks at the meat and potatoes of a site. There are so many SEO tricks and tips that try to game the system just to get their sites at the top of a search result without any regard for the user. If your site is relevant it’ll show up, if it’s not maybe you should work on providing better content not a better rank. I’m not saying all SEO tips are like this but honestly that is one idea of the web that I despise. That’s for another post though.
The solution? If a site provides an RSS feed, scrape that instead. To one up this idea, every page should have one atom feed designated for the content of that page. All of the navigation, bad comments, etc aren’t included. Of course once you start scraping RSS feeds all of the SEO jocks will start telling you to throw your entire site in to your feed. At least for a little while we’ll have a higher signal to noise ratio, and I can figure out if I should drop $200 on a kick ass watch.