On Google and the subjunctive tense...

or "A Case study on the stupidity of netizens..."

I study and think about the interaction between people, technology and policy. A lot of similar disciplines like HCI, CSCW, and the like are constantly concerned with or focused around how to interpret the needs of users and the strategies they employ to get things done with computers. Most of the time, the average or median user is not a genius... but nowhere near idiotic.

Every once in a while you get insight into exactly how dumb the low-end of the spectrum can be. For example, go to Google and search for the query (without quotes) "ebay order tracking" (clicking on the text will do this for you). When I do this right now, I see this:

The first result is from a fellow colleague and SIMS student, Yuri on his blog. It's to a blog entry where he talks about how "eBay should support order tracking". Now take a look at the comments. The first one is from me, the second from another SIMS student Sean from cheesebikini.

The rest of the comments are pretty ridiculous. It seems as if people have entered "ebay order tracking" into Google (the oracle) and landed at Yuri's blog. For some reason or another, a certain segment of this population decides that, yes, Yuri is somehow associated with eBay and will be able to track their packages.

What seems to be happening on a technical level is that Google's PageRank algorithm isn't weighting phrases properly. That is, the title of Yuri's post is "Ebay Should Support Order Tracking". That subjunctive "should" is very important to the relevance of the resulting queries and should demote Yuri's blog entry a bit, right?

This is so damned reminiscent of Parker's "Spanish Dancing" site... which had the same problem in that it was high in the Google results for the query "spanish dancing" and a bunch of 3rd graders went to his page looking for material for their book reports... and vented their displeasure in the comments to Parker's pictures of Spain. Although the two are distinct; someone is giving Yuri's audience credit cards and maybe even driver's licenses...

Posted by joebeone at Mayo 6, 2004 03:27 PM | TrackBack