[WEB4LIB] FW: Searching for AIDS: Google strikes again [Hardin MD

[Jennifer Heise]

> Nice article...but on the other hand, I'm not sure I'd always want a search
> engine to be making assumptions about what I want. I hope raw text searching
> remains an option alongside what you describe here.

Actually Google is doing raw text searching; it's the relevance ranking
by link analysis that is doing it; if you were to scroll down far
enough  you would get to the links about 'aids' of some other sort.
 
> (As an aside, in my life away from work, I host a website on Indonesian
> history. I would be perturbed if search engines suddenly decided that
> searches that mention "Java" were automatically about the programming
> language.)

Well, I tried two searches on Google and on Altavista and got similar
results: 'java' by itself retrieved about a million hits on 'Java' the
programming language; 'java indonesia' retrieved Indonesian sites.
Lycos was able to come up with one site on Indonesia in it's 'Popular'
section when asked for 'java' but the free text searching didn't have
any Indonesian sites in the top, say 25 when I searched on 'java' alone.

-- Jenne Heise, Lehigh University