Here’s a neat proposal for

Here’s a neat proposal for an anti-search tool, a standard way of telling a search engine what your page is not about — for example, we get tons of people coming to BoingBoing who’ve searched for “Nike Boing” on Google. These people are looking for nike.com, not this blog. With this proposal, we could add a meta tag to the page that says, basically, “This page is not about Nike.” I wonder, though: I think that there’s something marvellous about serendipity in search results (the Google link for us on a “nike boing” search reads “Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: … Monday, November 20, 2000. Nike TV commercial makes fun of disabled people,” and I think that people see that and think, “Hmm, a directory of wonderful things — gotta check that out.”). I also worry about the legal implications of anti-search terms. If this were adopted, then Nike’s lawyers may very well send us a nastygram demanding that we add metadata to stop our page coming up on searches for “nike.” LinkDiscuss (via /.)