I'm not very satisfied with the search results by Google for my name. While almost all results have something to do with me, even if you don't enclose my name in quotation marks, I'd wish for some easy way to “remove” the results of posts to mailinglists, newsgroups, and forums.
Testing
Just try it using ?hl=en&q=Carsten+Schurig. My blog is currently the third entry (ok, that may have changed tomorrow). If you search using German (?hl=de&q=Carsten+Schurig) it's worse with rank 34 currently.
Grouping the results
But Google isn't completely wrong, just not intelligent enough. Most of the entries ranking higher are from mailing lists or forum entries. Here I would wish, I could switch between “All Results”, “On Webpages”, and “Posts to Forums, Mailinglists, and Newsgroups”.
Significance of the results
If I'm looking for a name, it would be a big usability enhancement, if I could switch easily between results in e-mails (and similar) and results found on “normal” web pages. Often results in mailinglists are just not what I want when searching for a person, but if you're active on public mailinglists using your real name, Google will return these as most MLs have public archives (and if not there's still gmane).
How to do that?
Actually it should be pretty simple to detect if a result is an e-mail, newsgroup post, or forum entry. E-mails and newsgroup posts should be easily recognizable because of the headers, but forum entries could be a bit more complex.
It should even be possible to tell if a search string is a name, or not with a high certainty. You could use a name database for sure, but if many results of e-mails are returned, it's even easier: if the search string is found in header entries followed by an e-mail address (whether obscured or not), it's a name almost for sure.
Example
A nice example is searching at Vivisimo. This grouping there is pretty nice (although they don't recognize the search string as a name), but I'm not using Vivisimo very often, because it's just pretty slow…
Google, are you listening?
