Subject: RE: [hackers-il] More Google Fun

From: Omer Musaev <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 13:47:40 +0200

' -----Original Message-----
' From: Shlomi Fish [mailto:[email-masked]]
' Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 1:09 PM
' To: Hackers-IL
' Subject: [hackers-il] More Google Fun
' 
' 
' 
' Search Google for "%s" and you'll find the homepage of the GNU project
' as the first link:
' 
' http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=%25s
' 
' It probably has to do with the huge amount of printf and 
' friends that they
' use in their code.

Cute. But the probable explanation does not hold, IMHO. 

By performing little experiment, I had found that Google search
silently ignores the percent character when that prepends the 
search phrase. In other words, searching for "s" should bring us the 
same link as searching for "%s" would do. 

Let's test it:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=s

Well, it does. 
No relation to printfs and friends (and no relation to Ain Rand either.)

One possible reason may be the huge amount of homepages in style of 
"hey, I am Joe, and I have linked my silly page to GNU software!!!!" 

Another possible reason may be the secret donations to Google made
by FSF.

Yet another.... Well, I do not have a clue about it. But the phenomenon 
is cute nevertheless:)

' 
' Regards,
' 
' 	Shlomi Fish
' 
' 
' 
' ----------------------------------------------------------------------
' Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
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' "Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
' "Wait a second - is n a natural number?"
' 
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---

From: Adi Stav <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 20:09:37 +0200

> same link as searching for "%s" would do. 

Hmm.  I'd say that this is due to the "GNU's not UNIX" name, which has
the letter S all by itself.  Since gnu.org is very commonly linked to, 
it appears as the first result.  Look at the other results for S: all the
top results also have this form.

Other letters lead to other pages: C is CNET, D is D-Link, B is our very
own B'Tselem, and so forth.  Fun game.

--
"How come the paper clip doesn't creep up from behind those people 
with `it looks like you are trying to type an English document!'?" 
-- Ira Abramov, on MS-Word's BiDi user interface

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 19:08:55 +0200 (IST)

> same link as searching for "%s" would do.

Hmmpf. Yes - you are right.

I really hate how Google ignores such queries. Some queries with special
characters are practically impossible in Google. That's one of the things
that sometimes annoys me about it. But very rarely, since most of my
queries are in English.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

There is no IGLU Cabal!
They choose the nickname "%$#@-0=+|[}*/" and so Googling for them became
very hard.

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: Orna Agmon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 18:38:40 +0200 (IST)

> the letter S all by itself.  Since gnu.org is very commonly linked to, 

You are right about the 's in that page, but I believe that it is the 
's "Richard M. Stallman's article ". You can see that if 
you go to the cached version google gives: 
It highlights the searched words. 

-- 
Orna.   |  http://tx.technion.ac.il/~agmon

A cat has claws at the end of its paws.    
A sentence has a pause at the end of its clause.

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 11:28:48 +0200

> It highlights the searched words. 

Orna, the words on that page, and whether "'s" appears in it or not,
are quite irrelevant. It's the words in the *link text* to that page that
matters, as people already said.

For a longer explanation, here's a part from a message I sent this list
in May 2001:
--------------------

If you're interested to find out how Google works, take a look at
http://www7.scu.edu.au/programme/fullpapers/1921/com1921.htm

It's an article titled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web
Search Engine" which explains how Google works. This talk was given in the 7th
WWW conference (in 1998), by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page - then two
CS graduate students in Stanford, and now Google executives.

The idea is, to put it simply, google doesn't care only about a web-page
and the words in it - it puts a lot of emphasis on how many (and which)
other pages link to that page, and what text is used to link to this page.
So for example, even a very popular condom page (assuming such a page
exists ;)) is not likely to be linked as A HREF="..." the latex page /A.
So searching for latex, you are likely to get a page which mentions latex
(preferably in the title), but more importantly - that many other pages
(preferably themselves "quality pages" - see the full article for more about
that) link to this page with the word "latex" in the link page.

The Google article has a varient of this "latex" test - the "Bill Clinton"
test. They say how a person search for "Bill Clinton" on a contemporary
search engine got, as the first result, a page containing only the 3 words:
"Bill Clinton Suck". After all, 2/3 of all the text of that page was the
search terms, so it must be highly relevant. Right? Wrong :) Google finds,
as a first result, whitehouse.gov, because it works by finding the
Clinton-related site that most people would care enough about to link to,
and that is of course not the 3-word page.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |   Wednesday, Nov 27 2002, 22 Kislev 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Bureaucracy, n: A method for transforming
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |energy into solid waste.