Let's google Gogol!

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Michael Brewer wrote:

> I'm not sure you can always trust Google's search results to be the
> same for all users or for them to be the same from one moment to the
> next, or even for them to make sense.
> 
> For example, I just did the same search (Gogol on Google.com) and got
> only 1,770,000.  When I used Google's OR function (to expand my
> search to sites with either gogol or гоголь), it actually REDUCED the
> number of hits to 1,700,000, which makes no sense at all (you get
> 431,000 when you just search for гоголь on Google.com).
> 
> On google.ru I get 1,870,000 with gogol and гоголь gets 1,360,000.
> Combining them with OR gets 1,700,000.  This is also nuts.
> Interesting that I get the same number when combining the two on the
> two sites.

You're right that it's nuts. Those of use who work with Google on a 
daily basis know that Boolean searches often produce counterintuitive 
results when it comes to counts. For example, you can often exclude a 
term with a minus sign and get a higher count instead of a lower one. 
Thus, when I googled
	gogol гоголь
I got 34,000 hits, but when I excluded the Russian form:
	gogol -гоголь
I got 2,270,000 hits.

In this case it makes sense if you stop to think: the vast majority of 
sites containing "gogol" do not also contain "гоголь," so the first 
search (with implicit AND) is the narrower one.

Strangely enough, the results were exactly the same when I used 
google.ru in English, but when I switched to the Russian interface the 
narrower search produced 39,700 hits.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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