The Anti-Thesaurus

Nicholas Carroll has published a very useful proposal for a new HTML metadata tag named nonwords. This tag would allow web authors to block a given page from showing up in a search engine result set; Carroll points out that he is “embarrassed by drawing in … searchers, when I have no useful information for them” and the page hits use up his resources needlessly as well as wasting the searchers’ time. I think this proposal is useful, meets good design criteria of being minimal and tightly focused, and ought to be watched to see if any search engines (Google, are you listening?) agree to it. [Wes pointed me here.] A well-educated friend says that the proposal reminds him of “the Zen thing about knowing what something is by knowing what it is not…. or Plato’s shadows.”