Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009

By ESTHER AHRONHEIM

Kyoto

Although I found the Nov. 18 article "Lets kensaku — searching the Web in Japanese" interesting, it didn't tell me anything I was not already aware of. I was hoping it would address the biggest problem I have when doing Japanese-language searches online: search results primarily comprising people's blog entries.

For example, let's say I want to find a restaurant's location and business hours. Maybe I already know the restaurant's name and city, so I can put those in. Half the time, rather than the actual restaurant's Web page, or one of several restaurant/gourmet information sites, I get dozens of blog posts of people's lunches there, complete with photos of their food, but not the info I was looking for.

I read once that there are more bloggers and blog posts from Japan than from any other country on the Net. Based on my search results, this seems accurate.

Does the author of this article have any tips for refining search results in a way that excludes useless blog entries? I want to improve my signal-to-noise ratio!

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