Experiments

A selection of prototypes and experiments mainly conducted to learn about search engine indexing and the impact of code on search performance. They range from quick and dirty prototypes to near-production ready projects.

Visit the projects by clicking on the name in the left column, or read about the setting, research questions, and conclusion of the experiment by clicking on the right column of the table.

Overview of experiments in chronological order
URLDetails
Clinic Homepage Demo ➚Homepage of a fictitious clinic, with accessibility and safety best-practices applied. ➙
ECS Map ➚Interactive map of charging stations for electric cars in Switzerland and surround areas ➙
DPLMC ➚Platform to play the Diplomacy boardgame online ➙
People Nature Stones ➚Multilingual travel blog, prototyping of user friendly CMS ➙
MSA.IDX ➚Reddit sentiment analysis to explore the potential of content generated by user queries ➙
Disruption Deptartment ➚Research papers summarized by LLMs and made available in multiple languages, optimized CMS for productivity ➙
RxSearch ➚Medical drug information site, exploring ways to get content from large datasets indexed by search engines ➙
AiOped ➚News site for testing how text content written by LLMs is indexed by search engines, prototyping CMS ➙

RxSearch

What happens when a domain that was previously used for an online pharmacy and has a spammy history is used as a search site for RxNorm drugs?

Apart from some lessons learned, not much.

Summary
URLhttps://sftpharmacy.com
TypeRxNorm medical drugs search site
Domain historyExpired domain; large number of spammy backlinks
TimeJuly - present
StatusOngoing: observing, no further development.
Learnings
  • Very reasonable page speed considering that some queries require multiple API calls in successive steps.
  • A sitemap with 20 sample pages, cross-references and structured data markup (sitelinks search box) was used to help search engines discover new content. This worked nicely.
  • Google and Bing handle indexing very differently. While Google actively crawls the site and seems to use the keyword search box, Bing doesn't index pages at all. Whether this is because Google is more advanced in crawling sites or because the domain history is too spammy to be considered trustworthy by Bing is unclear. It is worth noting that sites that provide medical information are viewed more critically than others.