Buried in Twitter and Geo-terms Searching Fail

Soccer fail

Soccer fail Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’m a geek, I’ve been wrapped up in a new programming project with PHP and the Twitter API. Its going to be a new feature on the Geoprac site and I’m very excited about it, but its not quite ready for prime time yet.

Have you ever tried to Google a geo-term either for work or general interest and found mostly things that are completely unrelated to what your looking for? For example, try a google search for landslide. Mixed in with all the stuff of interest to geotechnical engineers and geologists are videos and lyrics for Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Nicks, the Dixie Chicks etc. Results from google news for landslide show similar problems, you get news stories about landslide victories in elections, on American Idol, etc. That’s the kind of stuff I’ve been dealing with when trying to sift through the sea of tweets out there…but I think its even worse on Twitter because half most of the time, people are twittering about nothing really. We’ll see how successful I am at sifting through the crap for the interesting tweets.

But one of my points in writing this post is to plug one of my related sites, GeotechSearch.com. Its a custom search engine powered by Google but it works on the principle of a “whitelist” where it only returns results from a specified list of sites. My list of sites comes from the GeoLinks section of the GeoPrac.net site where links can be submitted by any registered member. So if you or someone else have determined that your company’s site or one of your favorite geo-related sites is important enough to include in the GeoLinks, it should be included in GeotechSearch.com results (at least for the right keywords).

So for comparison, try the landslide search on GeotechSearch.com and see what you find. I think it does a pretty good job, but there is always room for improvement by adding more relevant sites to search, so become a member of GeoPrac and then submit your links (you can get there from the GeoLinks page, or from Menu).