I'd like to take a different view of this. I think it is the responsibility
of the *search services* to make the results they give more readable, not
the responsibility of the archive maintainers. Sure, the "fvwm" mailing
list archive is going to return a zillion hits for a search on "fvwm", but
if you exclude searchers from that archive and someone is looking for "fvwm
and Netscape", they won't see that there was a perfect message on that
subject. Worse yet, if they happen to be searching for information about
"Chrylistanocks" who is a maker of some "fvwm" software, and you have the
only "fvwm" site, they will get *no* hits even though the information is
available to them.
Just because the folks at AltaVista, Excite, and so on are too lazy to
create better interfaces to the results of searches doesn't mean that we
should cut off access to our valuable content. All Alta Vista has to do is
write software that looks at the result of a search that says "gee, there's
100 hits, 80 from a single site, maybe I should combine these in some smart
way and put this at the top of the result page and highlight it in some
way." They could even give you a hierarchical view of the results, such as
"Click here for all the individual messages at foo.com/fvwm-list that match
your request, click here for all the message in .su that match your
request" and so on.
Please, please don't start limiting access to your content based on today's
immature Web search technologies. Let it all be indexed and force the
indexers to do a better job of displaying their results. Believe me, the
indexing site that is able to say "2500 matches, displayed for you in a
reasonable fashion" will draw users to it quickly, and the other search
sites will follow suit.
--Paul Hoffman
--Internet Mail Consortium
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