Archæology

The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing

Really not a James

Google seems to think that “Jamie” is pretty much like “James”, for the purposes of the bolding of search terms on their results pages. Which is odd, because the results match because “Jamie” was used in a link to the page (as specified in their cached version of the page; and “James” is not highlighted or mentioned at all).

I would write to Google and ask them why this is, but given their complete lack of response to me pointing out their completely broken behaviour with respect to URL mapping, I shan’t bother.

Posted by jamie on August 14, 2005 14:09+12:00

Comments

They also return pages which contain "vegetable" when one searches for "vegetarian" which is completely unhelpful. I think this is relatively reent brokenness, any idea if they're planning some corrections? A

Posted by: Anita on August 14, 2005 15:26+12:00

I got really excited when I learnt you could put a tilde in front of words to get a synonym when using google, but judging by what I'm reading here, I can save myself the trouble! I wonder if Jeremy and Jerome would be conflated?

Posted by: Jeremy on August 15, 2005 21:52+12:00

Jeremy: I don’t believe that the results that are returned are determined by the appearance of “James” in my example. Rather, having retrieved the results using the exact terms entered, it is only in the displaying of parts of their text that the bolding of the incorrect term happens. So you should continue to use the tilde if you want synonyms.

Posted by: Jamie on August 16, 2005 20:59+12:00