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Digging Holes in Google
Kurt LoVerde writes "Though google has become synonymous with searching, the folks over at MSN have written up an interesting article on our favorite search engine's pitfalls. Included among these are a tendency to skew results toward shopping, a lack of diversity for searches containing synonyms and its impact on research."
That isn't an accident. In the early days on the USA, the dollar was pegged to the value of a Spanish gold coin. That Spanish coin could be broken into eight pieces to make smaller amounts - hence the term "pieces of eight". Each of the pieces was refered to as a "bit".
Eight bits made up a full coin, or a dollar. This wasn't lost of the people that coined the terminology of bit/byte.
Ya, you'd think they'd actually know how to use a search engine. "apple computer" will get you apple's site. "tulips gardening -florist" (w/o quotes will get you gardening tips for tulips. "dvdr880 review" will get you some reviews of the philips dvdr880.
8 80~FD-87
Out of curiosity I tried this same stuff they tried with google on http://search.msn.com. The "apple" search brought up only a few actual hits for apple with #1 being office depot, and #11 being apple.com, the "tulips" search brought up the first 5 links are to proflowers.com and 1800flowers etc... with the bottom half of the page being encyclopedias yadda yadda, the "dvdr880" search brought up every link to every tech store in the known universe, with only 2 that I could tell that had reviews of the model, one of them was ironically linked to this page http://www.google.dealtime.co.uk/xPC-Philips_DVDR
print "$insertThisWholeArticleIsATroll\n";
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It's very obvious that this guy is reaching here when he "Digs for Holes". It looks like instead of holes, he dug for BullS#!t, and found a lot of it.
Lets examine his points:
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time
Hrmm, lets see. I'm looking for a Home Theater Receiver today, so I type in: "Pioneer Receiver". and I get mostly links to places selling them. But lets say I want a manual for my receiver, so I type in "Pioneer Receiver manual", the results are much different. Thats what keywords are for...moron.
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms.
If I type in apple, OF COURSE i'm going to get results about apple computers. Just add the word fruit to your search, if thats what you're looking for. Ask and ye shall receive, I dunno about you..but most of those links seems to be relating to fruit.
Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning
Ok, I won't blame this one on google, I think this is due to the internet as a whole. Why would I go to the library, when I can poke around on the internet for 20 mins...and get just as much research done. Give me a break.
These all may be obvious points, but I was bored...so I decided to point them out.
home of the original cupholder
Err... maybe you should try searching for: "what you want to find out" -buy -commercial -shop -"some other terms involving exchange of money for goods and services"
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Good grief people:
Font Arial -"Font=Arial" -"Face=Arial"
How hard was that? Refining a search too much trouble ? Gah, "apple" results in Apple Computer! Somebody sue! I can't possible be bothered to enter a second or third keyword, READ MY FREAKING MIND!
Bah, I'm in a grumpy karma burning "ask a librarian for 'apple' and see what they ask you back" mood I guess.
Sig under construction since 1998.
...about these Googleholes:
"I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray..."
http://stevenberlinjohnson.com
You too can participate in the roast by finding his e-mail address on Google.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I have also noticed an increase in shopping related results on google lately. So I found
( q)
www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape
in my personal toolbar link and added:
+'+-shop+-deal+-value'
I've had much better results since then.
'apple fruit'
I skimmed the first 5 pages and there was no mention of Apple computer.