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About about.com

2005-02-19 19:07:06.738788+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

New York Times pays $820,000 each for 500 weblogs with annoying frame-based nav-bar-stealing user interfaces as it buys About.com.

So that brings me to a few musings on search engines. I played a little bit with the MSN Search, and I think it's worse for my purposes than Google, but it did show me why people like Mark Cuban keep investing in search companies: There are lots of ways to improve the search experience.

So, a suggestion: How about the ability to exclude URLs from searches. Not just "-site:...", but a wholesale list. Two, actually. One is sites I never want to see, the aforementioned About.com falls into that class. The second is "spare me the obvious", just for this search let me keep Amazon and IMDB and the like off the list so I don't have to make my way to page 3 to find the good stuff.

[ related topics: Weblogs New Economy ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: "spare me the obvious" made: 2005-02-20 11:32:01.635958+00 by: Hanan Cohen

Great idea, but I would rephraze it as "only/exclude big websites". Since search engines know how many pages each site has, I think it's easily feasable.

Hanan

#Comment My hit count has more than doubled since made: 2005-02-21 03:02:05.640282+00 by: baylink

search.msn.com got me.

Most of the searches, while it was in beta, were for things like "large breasts"; it's gotten a little more socially acceptable since it went production (though not much), but...