Re: Check website: dejanews

[Andy Carvin <acarvin@GSN.ORG>]

Betty Dawn Hamilton wrote:


Hi, Group! This is just a little "heads up" note. Everyone may not be
aware that what you post on various public lists that are archived can
be found via your name as the keyword at the dejanews site. Try it by
going to http://www.dejanews.com and typing in your name as it appears
on your e-mail address.

Since I post to a "public" group, I don't mind that my messages are
shown there because I know the messages are archived and can be found
online. What I *do* object to, though, is when I bring up my list by
typing in "Betty Dawn Hamilton", at the bottom of my list of messages
are other tacked-on messages that are not mine. I noticed one is
something about "playboy pictures" and some others are "3X5 photos" -- I
didn't check to see of what!

I plan to write dejanews and ask them not to tack on messages that are
not mine when keyword searches specify certain names. They were very
nice and helpful when I asked them to remove one message that I posted
that would have possibly been an embarrassment to someone else (they
told me how to do it). Anyway, I just thought you might be interested if
you haven't looked at the site.

-------

Dejanews is by far one of my favorite web services. I think it's a great
way to access USENET content. I totally understand your concerns, but I
think there's a partial explanation for why you got so many objectionable
hits in your search. When you visited the Dejanews search engine, you
probably typed in this for your search:

Betty Dawn Hamilton

and you probably then hit the submit button. If that's the case, you
didn't actually do a search for "Betty Dawn Hamilton." Instead, you
searched for Betty and Dawn and Hamilton. The default setting on Dejanews
is to search for all the words you type in, but _not_ for phrases. So,
your name was treated like three different words.

As a test, I visited dejanews and tried your name. Indeed, I got a lot of
hits from the LM_NEt USENET archive, but I also got hits from groups like
es.alt.binarios.sexo (a Spanish group for exchanging sexy pics),
bit.listserv.down-syndrome, and alt.collecting.autographs. These other
lists appeared because their messages happened to contain the words betty,
dawn, and hamilton, though not together as one name.

However, when I searched for

"Betty Dawn Hamilton"

(note the quotes included in the search), Dejanews gave me a 420 hits,
every single one of them coming from your postings on LM_NET and a couple
other lists. So with this search, Dejanews did what you originally wanted
it to do. The same thing happens no matter what words you type. When I
search for Andy Carvin (no quotes) I get references to me, as well as Andy
Rooney, Randy Travis, Carvin guitars, Wood Carving, and other things. When
I search for "Andy Carvin" (with quotes), I get messages only with the
words Andy Carvin next to each other, with in 99 percent of the cases
turns out to be me.

So, I guess the lesson learned here is that Search Engines still aren't
very smart. When they're designed well and the directions are given
clearly, they can be great tools. But here on Dejanews there's no mention
of needing to use quotes in order to search for exact phrase matches. I
had to guess in order to get it right. A few engines like Hotbot are
getting smart enough to search for names, phrases, combinations of phrases
and the like. But until the major search engines become totally intuitive
and intelligent, we're going to find ourselves searching through a lot of
useless debris in order to find the nuggets of gold.

ac

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