Remember when weather radar reports used to reference “ground clutter” near the antennae— the clump of color that looked like it was rain, but wasn’t? We seem to have that same problem in search engine results for items that pop high in the news— ground clutter focused on recent events that stop us from having a clear view of a subject.
Last night I read this story broken by the New York Times: Sergeant’s Wife Kept a Blog on the Travails of Army Life. My first inclination was to go find that blog and see the unselfconscious primary text. I started off with the direct approach— a search for “Karilyn Bales blog”. That returned a list of stories referencing the NYT account of her blog.
Next I moved to some more Google-ninja approaches, including a search for a unique phrase from the original text (“Quincy slept in our bed last night.”) and one that attempted to remove the phrase “New York Times” from that query. Nothing seems to be working.
I regularly ran into the same problem when I ran the blog GoogObits in the early-mid 2000s. When a person dies, search results for their name and/or accomplishments tend to focus on the fact of their passing rather than the accomplishments and stuffing of their life.
Google Advanced Search has a “last update” method for searching based on some time period stretching back to a certain time period (week/ month/ year/ etc.), but it does not allow you to exclude the most recent time period.
This may already exist, but I just don’t know about it. Any ideas?
