Better Searching

Originally published at Kenya Allmond: In My Own Words. You can comment here or there.

I watch my web site statistics regularly to see how people find me. I normally do so both by using Google Analytics and by looking at the web logs directly. Here are a few searches from yesterday that have resulted in visits to my site.

• my life story from kenya to usa


• taxis in kenya


• what kind of name is Obama?

Search engines index individual words not concepts. Ask.com is the only one that I believe that answers questions. It's up to the individual user of a search engine to use the appropriate words to find what they seek. Then the user must figure out if a site has information you want from the excerpt shown in the results. Many times this is easy (see "taxis in kenya" results above).

At any rate, I believe I have found the answer to the Kenyans finding my site by mistake. If you are looking for information in the Republic of Kenya, use Google's Kenyan site. Note the difference in the search for taxis in kenya. Similarly if you are looking for YouTube videos about Kenya, do not search on Google but on YouTube instead. I do not use "Kenya" as a tag and my videos are not in the results of a search of Kenya.

I have to give some credit to Nil Simmonds who did a presentation called "Web 2.0 and Africa" as PodCampDC last weekend as I had not thought of this until I was listening to his presentation.