Wednesday, March 12, 2008

What's Wrong with Google

Here is something I just noticed. The search results for a word, and that word in quotes are different. This seems very wrong to me from an IR standpoint. Shouldn't they be the same set of search results?
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1 comment:

Bryan Hurley said...

Search for a word that isn't an adjective or such. "Big" isn't a good test. Search for Corvette, or Samsung or Singapore. The two searches may be off by one value in the second or third digit. If this is the case, refresh both searches and they may come in line. The other thing is, Google isn't just one server. You are hitting different servers and can get different results and order of results. If you ran a test over a long enough period, with words that mean something, most likely the results from the two searches would arrive at a mutually equal list of results with little to no difference. Even a search for "Big"/Big right now comes back with the same number of results. There is still the stock ticker and image result difference, but in general, this doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.

March 12, 2008 at 11:32 PM

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