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."

Comments

Correlation != Causation

[taped2thedesk]

In some cases this be because there are just a shitload of shopping sites out there? For example, do a search for 'credit'. You get page after page of various domains from the same companies offering credit reports. Keep in mind, search engines are nothing but algorithms. Furthermore, the pagerank system that google uses takes into account how 'helpful' users found various sites, the number of times a word appears on the site, etc.

Article's big problem with Google (paraphrased)

[operagost]

It doesn't read the minds of morons who expect to get relevant results by plugging single search words like "apple" and "flowers" into a search engine that indexes millions of pages.