Could someone please explain this Google most-linked or queried predictive text to me? First result. Seriously, I'd love to hear any theories that won't send me diving for a heating pad and a bottle of bourbon.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Uh, What?
Y'KNOW, this isn't exactly the feel good follow up to that last post I wanted, but, um...
Could someone please explain this Google most-linked or queried predictive text to me? First result. Seriously, I'd love to hear any theories that won't send me diving for a heating pad and a bottle of bourbon.
Could someone please explain this Google most-linked or queried predictive text to me? First result. Seriously, I'd love to hear any theories that won't send me diving for a heating pad and a bottle of bourbon.
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7 rumbles:
No idea. In my case, top result was "how do I find my ip address?"
YIKES! And I thought it was bad when I went searching for parking and typed "green p" and "green poop" popped up as #1. How many people have green poop and need to google it?
But yeah, killing babies is WAY more bizarre.
One of the problems with Google's predictive search is that (like page results itself) it tends to equate what people actually click on with quality of result.
For example - if thousands of people searching for "screenwriting tips" click on your site from the resulting list, your site will start to come up higher in the rankings, because clearly it contains what people are looking for when they search for "screenwriting tips". By comparison, perhaps not a lot of people click on your site when they're searching for "dead things", so your results would be depreciated on that list. This works pretty well for something like search where the act of searching requires you to input a complete phrase before getting results.
However when you apply this to predictive results, what happens is that occasional outlier results (which you get in any search database), are often so disconcerting that a large percentage of people searching for something else entirely ("how do I kill the mice in my attic") stop their search to click on early, outlier results. This isn't because it's what they're looking for, it's entertainment, shock value, voyeurism, or just to figure out why the heck so many people are searching for "x" (did I miss a news story?)
This creates a classic positive feedback loop - Google considers that item "x" is a valuable result for search term "y", promotes the outlier higher in the list, where it attracts more attention, gets more clicks, and moves higher until it sticks at (or close to) the top of the results list.
You'll notice, often in these cases if you search for "thematic synonyms" (say "how do I", "how can one", "how to") there's usually no sign of the oddity results - while others trends are clearly visible (for example all three of the above variants generally have results about losing weight in the top couple... which one would expect).
Thank you for that. Much better. You have just sponsored my night's sleep.
Phew! That explanation was a relief. I thought you were looking for me!
Think of the lyrics to Rock-a-bye Baby. There's an angry undercurrent among parents who desperately want some sleep.
It's from all the TV writers who have just been given notes on a first draft.
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