One thing that I tire of is searching the web for something like "Synaesthesia" and then finding a hundred pages featuring that word in a frivolous "this is a cool word so I'll use it for my project/pet/computer" manner.

A way to improve the situation would be to have meta tags with a -literal postfix. Then, if you did a web page that really *was* about synaesthesia, the meta tag would feature be "synaesthesia-literal". Then if enough people adhered to this standard (I wish :( ) you could search for pages with the search term "synaesthesia-literal". Or even better, search engines could have an advanced search item: "match literal content" or somesuch.

It'll never happen but I like the idea.
-- lardus, Feb 20 2003

If you spell it "synesthesia"... http://www.google.c...search=&safe=images
at least the first page of hits looks entirely spot on.
I second Angel: just as a search for "Al Gore" during the last election turned up dozens of porn sites, so will any search on Google run the risk of turning up irrelevant trivia. [DrCurry, Oct 04 2004]

Copperic.
-- sild, Feb 20 2003


How often does this sort of thing actually come up?
-- waugsqueke, Feb 20 2003


How often does what come up? You mean the situation where you find a word used quite a lot not in context? Enough times to be annoying for me, anyway...
-- lardus, Feb 20 2003


Yes, how often does the premise of this idea as described in the first paragraph actually occur? I don't think I've ever had it happen in 9 years of web browsing. Certainly not a memorable time, anyway.
-- waugsqueke, Feb 20 2003


It seems like what you want is the existing keywords meta tag. If "synaesthesia" just crops up incidentally, it shouldn't appear there.

Of course, search engines ignore such tags because they're widely misused, but that's a problem you'd have with any solution of this kind.

(It'll be interesting to see how high this page eventually ranks on Google searches for "synaesthesia".)
-- Monkfish, Feb 20 2003


I dunno, [waugs]. Gooooogle throws up 793 hits (total of 27,700) for 'synaesthesia', not all of which are to do with the actual phenomenon. It is, apart from anything else, the title of an Andy Summers album (and some daft Chicagoan's web-log). My objection, if it can be called such, is that the facility would be abused just as much as the '<meta name="keywords" content="whatever">' tag is already. There's no mechanism to ensure that <meta> tags are accurate.
(Incidentally, has anyone been to [Susen]'s old site recently? If you haven't, don't. I accidentally clicked on the link in my local 'bookmarks' file - it's a porn site now.)
-- angel, Feb 20 2003


Better category.
-- snarfyguy, Feb 20 2003


snarfyguy: What, a porn site for Susen, or Other: General for this idea?
angel: Ugh! The fate of many defunct web sites, I'm afraid.
-- DrCurry, Feb 20 2003


The former, [Dr]. This idea should be moved to a more appropriate category.
-- snarfyguy, Feb 20 2003


How about Computer:Web:Searching??
-- reap, Feb 21 2003


// This idea should be moved to a more appropriate category // - SnarfyGuy

Which would be a better category? I thought web searching was the best category I could find... should it just be in Other::general?
-- lardus, Feb 28 2003


'Synaesthetic' is a Blue Man Group track.
-- galukalock, Feb 28 2003



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