Sometimes what I’m interested in may be more specific or niche, but a lot of search engines and filtering systems don’t seem to provide a way to drill down to those results. What may be some reasons behind that?
Or am I overlooking some obvious ways to search/filter this way?
Sorting by the least viewed/visited sites wouldn’t necessarily help in finding anything relevant to your search, and would just be topped out with placeholders, ad spam and generative garbage that isn’t useful to anyone, which would explain why they aren’t visited more in the first place.
If your search engine of choice still works properly, you can find more specifics or niche things by putting very specific phrases in quotations.
“People on horseback”
would give more specific results than just:
People on horseback
You can narrow it down with other modifiers like + for and and - to filter out results that have the following keyword.
“People on horseback” +fields -flowers
There usually is a page somewhere within the search engine that explains all the modifiers you can use. There are a lot more than what I’ve given here.
While largely true, I was also thinking of filtering/sorting systems within specific sites (e.g. stores/archives/etc.) as well, which may result in similar junk results but fewer than with a search engine.
That requires turning every read into a write – which is slow/expensive generally. (That might not matter much for Google – who try to record everything you ever do already, basically – but it matters for everyone else.)
Also, it tends to promote spam and offensive niche content. kbin’s got a sidebar that tries to promote random low activity communities and posts, for example, and it’s almost uncanny how much crap it pushes up…
Because advertising and engagement. A lot of things like Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t want to have an optimal search result because it’s more profitable to them if you mouse over a few ads before you find what you’re looking for (in theory).
