Listen Up Search Engines- I Want “Opt-Out” for Relevance

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I noticed today that the search terms synchronize blackberry yahoo calendar were bringing users to this site. I laughed, because this is clearly NOT the site that you’d want to visit if you want to use a Blackberry to synchronize a Yahoo calendaring service. First, I don’t even own a Blackberry (Windows Mobile rocks!). Second, I don’t use any Yahoo calendaring services. Exchange with ActiveSync over the air works awesome for me. I don’t adovate that people use a Blackberry to synchronize their Yahoo calendars and I don’t have any useful information for them on this topic.

I noticed this is another context as well. Robert Scoble has had several weblogs. To this date, Google still sees Robert’s old Radio weblog as the most relevant site when you search for scoble. Meanwhile, he has to manually create entries to point users to his newer and much more active blog (BTW- MSN Search gets this right). I have the same problem. I’ve had three blogs since I started blogging, and the oldest two of them get picked up first. Sure, I did blog since May of 2003 at what became MSDN blogs and then spent another year blogging at my own domain. This site hasn’t had nearly as many links, but it is clearly the most active of my blogs and in my mind the most relevant site if you’re searching for me.

What I want is some kind of tag that allows me to opt-out for certain search terms. I know what is relevant on my site, and I’d like to be able to tell the search engine what I think. I know that this is a very hard technical problem to solve without user intervention, so while we wait for search engines to improve their understanding of what content is most relevant for certain search terms, allow the users to give their input and help searchers and readers be more productive. The engines should obviously include me in their index, but they could allow users to filter search results based on this kind of “opt-out” for certain search terms. Since this is an “opt-out” model, there is very little chance that it can be abused in any way by spammers. I think the result would be far better search results for users. If this principle doesn’t make sense for a general purpose search application, it certainly makes sense for blog searches.

So, what do you think of “opt-out” for certain search terms and relevance for a given topic?

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