Wolfgang Schwarz

David Lewis and Google

Most of the 5.3 million results Google returns for 'David Lewis' aren't about David Lewis the philosopher. The 53000 results for '"david lewis" OR "david * lewis" ~philosophy' look more promising. But even they contain lots of completely irrelevant stuff (like this one), and many of the not completely irrelevant results are uninteresting pages at bookstores selling one of Lewis' books.

So I've written a script that applies a kind of Bayesian filter to the Google results in order to pick out those pages that really contain information on Lewis. The script currently only scans the first 1000 Google results for '"david lewis" OR "david * lewis" ~philosophy' once every week. Here is the result: David Lewis on the Internet. (The pages in the "New this week" section aren't really new. They are either new in the Google top 1000 or they had a calculated relevance < 0.5 last week. At the moment the section contains many PDF documents because the script couldn't handle PDF documents last week. It still can't handle DOC, RTF and PS files.) The page is in experimental stage. E.g. the filter sometimes yields strange classifications, and perhaps I'll eventually include results from other queries. It probably also looks somewhat strange in outdated browsers like Internet Explorer.