Monday, October 5, 2009

Google’s Fuzziness Complicates Certain Programming-Related Queries

Using Google for development related queries has become partly harder. Here are two successive searches I just did:

open files with wscript

- For this query, Google automatically replaced my search query with “open files with jscript” and put the two top results for that on top, followed by results for my actual query*. I didn’t even notice at first. Google figured I probably meant jscript and not wscript, though wscript is exactly what I meant. I then typed:

automatically open files with wscript vbs

- For this query, Google completely ignored the word “automatically”, but only told me so at the bottom of the page**, so naturally I read through the results first. However this had changed the meaning of my query leaning more towards something I wasn’t looking for (I’m looking for info on how to connect a file extension to always open it with a particular VBS file, not how to open a file within the VBScript).

Google’s fuzziness may be good at times, and at other times, it’s increasingly confusing.

*"Did you mean: open files with jscript Top 2 results shown”.

**"Tip: These results do not include the word “automatically”. Show results that include ’automatically’.”.

Google’s Fuzziness Compli ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (17)

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