Monday, May 28, 2012

Looking for John Smith

This is another update on the Blogger Search function.

It has been seen that if you search for the occurrence of a person's name within a blog you may get an unrealistic list returned that gives you the impression that there are far more posts related to that person than is a fair representation of the featuring of that person on a blog.

For example, if you were looking for posts that contained the name "John Smith" and you used that name as keywords in a search, you would get all posts that contain a reference to John Smith. While this is maybe what you are after, it does not give you a feeling for the relationship between those posts and the total number of posts on the blog.

John Smith may have been involved with an activity that you had been reporting on and you had made multiple references to him. This is not that you have a particular desire to expose John, just that you are trying to highlight the activities that John is involved in. Over time, especially if John responds to what you have written, the number of posts is likely to be quite high with John's name in them. John may have been participating in something that you had determined as a dubious business. It was this business practice that you were exposing, NOT John specifically.

1 comment:

Newport Beach said...

I see what you mean. I have been looking for information about a certain individual and I keep finding this blog.

I understand that your blog covers topics that are pretty much unrelated to the person I am interested in but it would seem that I keep on finding your site instead of other pages on the Internet. It is almost as if the person in question has been very active to have all references to his name expunged from the records.

In any case thanks for featuring pages on him as what you do have, I think, pretty much sums him up and what he is capable of.