Google oddness
I have noticed something odd about Google searching (well, either that or I’m being very thick here…).
Say you search for stick (random word), the top result at the time of writing is "www.stick.com - Stick Enterprises Inc. Manufacturer of two-handed fretboard tapping instruments.". OK, so what happens if you search for stick stick? I wouldn’t really expect the results to change but they do, now the top result is "Stick Cricket - The World’s Best Online Cricket Game!".
What does this mean? Is stick cricket more stick-y than Stick Enterprises? Does the word ’stick’ appear more times on the cricket page?
From a boolean logic point of view I don’t really see how the search engine is parsing ’stick stick’ any differently to ’stick’ (although it is undeniably a complex beast).
You can’t emphasise a word any more by repeating it surely? Searching for ’stick’ means stick is all I’m interested in, typing ’stick stick’ can’t make that any more so.
Adding more terms changes the results each time, if we try stick stick stick now the top result is "THE STICK CENTER official Chapman Stick web site". Interestingly the number of returned hits does not change, it’s ~178mil for each of the searches, so the top search doesn’t seem to be changing on account of the other pages being excluded from the returned set. Odd!