Search engine results not very relevant
Posted by Ryan
March 4, 2005
Either search engines have taken a dive in delivering relevant results or I’ve just been searching for more and more obscure things lately. Maybe both. Whatever the reason, lately it seems to take me twice as long to find what I’m looking for. This change has happened within the last month. One of my friends noticed the same thing and mentioned it to me.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Of course, all I’ve been searching for are things programming related so that may have something to do with it as well. BUT! Since when does searching for something like “php round to nearest ten” * bring up results that have nothing to do with PHP, but pages that contain the words “round” and “nearest” and have a .php extension?! I would think that a file’s extension should not count towards rank. The way it is now, if two duplicate pages about PHP exist and one has a .php extension and the other a .htm, the .php page would probably get a higher rank. That’s stupid in my opinion. The extension says almost nothing about the content except that it’s probably dynamically generated, but even then you can’t be sure.
Then again, if there were really no results that had contained the word “php” and there was one that had the extension .php, I guess it might as well be displayed. But not if real related results do exist without using the extension.
* = I needed to round a number to the next highest value of 10. Example: 321 –> 330. PHP’s built in functions round, floor, and ceil are all for floating point numbers. What I needed was ceil, but that works only with floating point numbers. I’m terrible at math, but a friend finally pointed out the simple solution to me (yes, laugh why don’t you! mock my math skills! I know I’m terrible at it.):
$notRounded = 321;
$rounded = $notRounded / 10; # 321 becomes 32.1
$rounded = ceil($rounded); # 32.1 becomes 33
$rounded = $rounded * 10; # 33 becomes 330
It’s been said that girls only like guys with sweet skills. I just hope I can make up for my lack of sweet math skills with something else like burping.
