[documentation] Re: NEED CHANGE IN RSS OUTPUT

[Laura Scott]

> My blog name is "Ketchup". I write a post about shoe laces. It's a 
> pretty damn good post. Why would "Ketchup: Shoelaces" be more 
> acceptable than "Shoelaces: Ketchup"? I'm not "selling" my blogname in 
> a post about shoelaces, I'm "selling" the fact that I'm the god of 
> shoelaces.
>
> As a search engine *user*, I could give two shits about *who* wrote 
> something. What's important to me is *what that person has said*. 
> Authority or name recognition should not influence opinion. [1]
>
I do not wish to interject myself into this apparently ongoing conflict 
of opinion, and I'm not sure why it's in the documentation list now, but 
with this statement above I have to say that I cannot disagree more.

The *authority* of content -- the *source* of the content -- is 
*essential information* for any search I do, because the source of 
information can reveal the character and quality of the information.

Example: I search for "Samuel Alito". It makes a huge difference knowing 
the source of the article. Maybe I want facts, news. Then I'd look for 
the newspaper sources, for example, and would avoid someplace like 
Little Green Footballs. But if I want to know what the right wing is 
saying, then I look for those kinds of sources. There may be 
philosophical reasons why someone would not care who's saying something, 
but it's hardly a universal view, or I think even a majority view. If 
George Bush says, "I want to establish peace in Iraq" and Desmond Tutu 
says, "I want to establish peace in Iraq," I daresay those are radically 
different statements *because of their sources.*

I also note that search engines like Google truncate title displays, so 
any Drupal-powered post title longer than a few words will have its 
source truncated off the result completely.

As for "evidence" that having the source before the title, I refer to 
the vast majority of CMSs that do just that. Google up just about 
anything and you'll see [source] : [title].... in nearly all the hits 
(unless there's a preponderance of Drupal-powered results).

(As for RSS, I agree that web standards must be retained. AFAIK, most 
search engines crawl sites, use the title metatag to log posts, and 
don't use RSS for their content.)

That's it, that's all I have to say on this subject here.

Laura

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