Options dwindle for London baseball mavens
PrintGooglebug du jour
Posted in Music and Media, 18th October 2003 20:04 GMT
Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer: 30-day free trial.
Baseball fans in London have just ten online destinations to follow their favorite sport, if Google is to be believed. Last week Google offered fourteen. Of course Google finds far more matching results than it reports: 330,000, it tells us. It simply deems 329,993 of them as unfit for browsing, and we can't see them. Why?
Plagued by link farms and blog noise, Google's engineers have resorted to brute force suppression of the search results, in the process, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Recently rival search engines with much smaller resources - they index fewer pages - have trumped Google by offering clearer, more useful results. In this example, the word 'watch' triggers the anti-spam filter. (You'd think that a better search term for baseball fans which avoids the noun - Watching baseball London would far better: but it doesn't. Google returns just ten out of 94,400 results.
So is Google's policy of indexing more pages more often better? Or do users simply value a few good results? And what are we missing? ®
Related Stories
Emergency fixes for blog-clogged Google
Google bug blocks thousands of sites
Blog noise achieves Google KO
Blog noise is 'life or death' for Google
Google to fix blog noise problem
Free whitepaper – Optimizing the data center for cost and efficiency
Enabling the Agile Data Center
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Analyst Keynote: The Register Agile Data Center Summit
Dirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide
Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores
Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala
Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter