Search Results Categorizing

Hello everybody!

I'm fully aware that the subject has already been discussed here, but actually those post were somewhat general.
I've learned several search engine's "way of thinking". In most cases I can't find relevant content for my query, until I get the query narrowed to a very specific phrase. Often that phrase doesn't return anything at all.
I need a kind advice, or sooner a consideration: how useful would it be to have a search results categorizer? Wouldn't it be the same as making a query more specific? I've read a topic with an example here: the word "apple" can return search results containing Apple as the computer vendor, apple as a fruit, apple as the rock group etc.
But actually if you're searching for a fruit, woudn't it be reasonable to type "apple fruit" and resolve the problem?

If not, what options would you want in the discussed categorizer? Would you be willing to spend much traffic on refining results?
Would you like to cut off all the "moved" and "not found" links?
Is it reasonable to make it engine-specific?

Thanks in advance!

Oxana Seglova
Monday, March 22, 2004

Like this?

http://directory.google.com/

goo gull man
Monday, March 22, 2004

Not so fast.
This comes to one's mind at once, of course. But how much time does it take for you to find, say, expert systems there? You still have to enter the query and search manually.

Oxana Seglova
Monday, March 22, 2004

Isn't this one of the myriad problems XML is supposed to definitively solve?

Kyralessa
Monday, March 22, 2004

Even with XML, how do you know that a site careterised as "Animal Husbandry" is not actually -  goatc.cx

It will be a while before they take man out of the categorisations.

Tapiwa
Monday, March 22, 2004

There's a few like this. Here's one;

http://vivisimo.com/

Nigel
Monday, March 22, 2004

I wonder if one could do automatic clustering based on the top NN results, and present the user with the clusters instead of the documents/pages themselves.  Then after the user has decided on the cluster that is most applicable to their search, they drill down to get the documents within the cluster.

Elephant
Monday, March 22, 2004

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