An Older which was Better

A comment regarding John Maeda's Maeda's SIMPLICITY: Newer is Worser?

An Older which was Better

Before 1997 (or thereabouts) Altavista had a feature which they discontinued and none of the major search engines has tried to revisit and improve. After a search quesry was made, you were presented with a javascript page that allowed you to eliminate popular words which Altavista had found on the pages which had contained your keyword. The difference between this and user defined negative boolean keywords is that many times the user may not be aware of a word's application within a specific knowledge niche. For example, suppose a non-techie searches for the word "integrity" looking for articles on personal character. There are many knowledge niche meanings of the word "integrity" which have nothing to do with personal character. The old Altavista technology would return a list of words found on websites which contained the word integrity. It would also cluster group these found words based upon statistical analysis of words occurring within the same context. The user could then eliminate or insist on words to improve the relevancy of the "found" pages.

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