[WEB4LIB] Re: Google, Pikachu, porn, etc.

[John Hubbard]

Google renders results based on how and what other pages link to sites, and
how their links are titled.  So a search for "micorsoft" (typo) will obtain
the Microsoft homepage as the first result, even though it's not spelled
this way on the page.

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.pokemon.com/+pikachu+porn&hl=en
explains that "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: porn"

Hope that helps,
- John


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]On Behalf Of Tom Zimoski
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2000 11:01 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Google, Pikachu, porn, etc.


It's not that unusual for a search engine to return on the first page of
results some unexpected sexual material.  It hardly seems to matter what
one was searching for.  I remember using alltheweb for a search, getting
this unexpected sexual material, and then appending -sex to my original
search. The results were much better on that particular search.  I
understand that I might have eliminated some useful sites.

It was that experience that led me to experiment with pikachu and porn as
search terms. I'm still looking for help in understanding the result
describe below.

Tom Zimoski/Fresno County Library

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Roy Tennant wrote:

> Pikachu porn? What on earth can you be thinking? No, come to think of
> it, I don't even want to go there! <grin>
> Roy
>
> >I've sent essentially this same message to Google and may one day receive
> >a reply but I am not optimistic.
> >
> >While preparing for a beginning internet class we will be offering to the
> >public I was playing around and came up with these results from Google:
> >
> >pikachu        about 206,000 hits
> >pikachu -porn  about 134,000 hits
> >pikachu porn   about     943 hits  (including www.pokemon.com)
> >
> >It seems to me that the last two should add up to the first. I know each
> >number is preceded by "about" but really! There may be something
> >basic about using Google that I fail to grasp.  Can you help?
> >