[odf-discuss] [Fwd: EC studying the monopoly of Microsoft on office suites]

[marbux]

On 4/11/07, Lars D. Noodén <lars at umich.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, marbux wrote:
> > Published on March 27 and I'm just finding out about this? Wow!
>
> Is there any contact person at Google News who we can work with to get
> relevant material to show up in a timely manner in their search index?
>

It's been hellishly difficult for me to frame a search query that does
a good job of filtering for ODF-related articles. A very big part of
the problem is that "opendocument" is a string that sometimes I think
appears in over half the CGI database retrieval calls on the Web.
E.g., I subscribe to Google's blog alert system and get an email
everytime a new blog article appears that has "opendocument in the
text or the URL. About 90 per cent of what I get has nothing to do
with ODF and I have to skim a lot of emails to come up with something
worth passing on. So "opendocument" is pretty much a useless search
term unless you're looking for something more narrowly defined. Try
google for "opendocument" and view the number of hits you get. Wow!
ODF must really be taking off. Not! It's a case of too many Web admins
and software developers including "opendocument" in URLs to
distinguish between public and non-public documents.

But if your query uses "ODF" instead, you miss a lot because many
articles refer only to "opendocument." I'd love to hear any ideas for
designing a better query to use for monitoring the Web for new
ODF-related articles. It would be nice if Google allowed you to
exclude URLs from a search, but no joy there yet.

Best regards,

Marbux