Search Me
Google--or to be fair, search engines in general--have revolutionized research. What used to take hours, days, even weeks to track down can often be discovered in a few seconds. We should all be grateful.
But isn't it overkill? I'm going to type something into Google right now--"toy robots." (I don't particularly care about the subject, but I have a friend who's an expert and anyway, it's something that's likely to get a reasonably large amount pulled up from the net.) What happens? Well, in 0.19 seconds I got "about" 15,100,000 results.
I have to take Google's word for it, though I have no reason to doubt them. But really, if it said 15,000, or 1500, even 150, it'd be more than I know what to do with. Fifteen would be about right. In fact, I'm trying to think of the last time I went beyond the first page of my Google results. Pretty rarely, and I don't think I've ever gone beyond page three.
I suppose the results get a little less on point the further you go, but anyway, while it's nice to know there are thousands of pages out there, is this useful information or something closer to bragging?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:13 AM
3 Comments:
Whats always confused me is the hits which turn out not to contain the search term at all
Always put a term in quotes. "toy robots" with quotes gets only 537,000 hits.
Anonymous: There are two reasons for this. First, the HTML page creator can include invisible "key words" in the header if he/she wants the page to show up in searches for those words. Second, for the past few years Google has included key words from other pages that link to a page in its indexing routine. For example: Toy Robots. When the Google spider reaches the page you are currently reading, it will associate the page I just linked to with toy robots, and it will turn up in future searches of "toy robots" even though it doesn't mention those words. Most of the time, this is probably a good idea, but sometimes it produces nonsense.
Whenever I've gone past the first page (and I usually use Bing), I'm surprised how many repeat references you get (often 4 or 5 in the first 3 pages of results).
The word I'm searching for may very well show up on multiple pages at the same site, but you would think search engines could quickly determine how many finds are the same page, and group them under one header.
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