Monday, February 02, 2009

Google Has Gone "Psychic"

I harped on Yahoo search a while back for displaying not only crackpot websites when one does a search on "physics", but also listing psychic websites, which is the antithesis of physics. So now, to be fair, I will have to whine also at Google search for doing almost the same thing.

It appears that lately (or it could just be my imagination), that the psychic websites are appearing more frequently when one does a "physics" search. I don't remember this occurring this often before. Did something changed? Here's an example:



Of course, as with the result of a Yahoo search, this is annoying but not unexpected. These search engines are trying to be too clever and anticipate all possible spelling mistakes that might people make. In the process, it'll list things that are of a complete opposite to the subject matter that one is looking for. As intelligent as they try to make it to be, this shows that the search logic is still pretty dumb.

Zz.

4 comments:

Ben Lillie said...

Interesting. You must have a key setting different from me, my results for "physics" don't return anything to do with psychics. (Except in the "sponsored links" part, which has a very different explanation.)

ZapperZ said...

Or maybe they like you more than me! :(

Zz.

Heumpje said...

I get more annoyed by Google Ads. They seem to take pleasure in placing ads for psychics and related stuff on science website. For example, the physics arXiv blog always has this add for some kind of energy wand/healing nonsense (except right now of course).

phule said...

[[They seem to take pleasure in placing ads for psychics and related stuff on science website]]

Heumpje,

I think you might need to review how Google Ad-Words actually works.