...more recent posts
I've been thinking that all the hits weblogs get from search engines usually don't result in the searcher connecting with the information sought because in most cases the information a search engine has seen on a weblog will already have been pushed off into the archives by the time the searcher comes along. I wish google would spider my archives and not my main page. Probably I could set up robots.txt to create this outcome, but because google ranks results based on an algorithm that pays attention to how many other pages are linked to yours, having google spider your archives (which it would see as different from your main page which most people would have links to) would probably hurt your search result positioning.
A different idea I had would be to look at the refering page when a page here is requested. If it's coming from google (or another search engine) you could parse the refering URL, extract the search phrase that was entered into google, and feed that into the search engine here to bring up the requested page, but with only those posts that mention the search phrase. Maybe the top of the page could be a standard explanation like: "I see you are looking for something specific. I've tried to provide you just that information. If you'd like to see this page as it would normally appear, click here."
At least that way all my "antrax symptons" searchers would find what they are, errr, looking for.
Oh yeah, I know, "that won't scale" but not everybody is trying to scale. Why not take advantage of unpopularity by building in more features then you could for a high traffic site?