Computer Research

Google Suggest and Obama

Google Suggest, which tries to auto-complete popularly used phrases, currently completes “is ” into “is obama muslim”. Guess that means the question is on a lot of people’s minds these days, of greater importance even than knowing the contagiousness of bronchitis, or the legality of Limewire! [Thanks TomHTML!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Suggest and Obama | Comments]

Google’s Synonym for Scientology: “Cult”

Just yesterday I posted on the Googlebomb (if it’s one) that when you enter dangerous cult into Google, Scientology* pops up as first result. Well, there’s more: if you enter ~scientology into Google, you’re triggering a search for synonyms as well due to the tilde character. Now what happens is that Google, in bold, highlights all those words it considers synonyms of “Scientology"**. The following two words appear right on the first results page: “cult”... and “Travolta”.

(Now, while probably only Google employees know how the synonyms algorithm works, we have reason to believe it’s build to scale, i.e. it is fully automated based on e.g. data crawled from the web... and not determined by editors. In other words, it may be more related to the way the web at large discusses Scientology, and which words people use around the subject.)

On that note, here’s a small trick if you want to know what Google considers synonymous for a given word. Say the word you want to give a try is “love”, then use the following query ...

~love -love

... which results in “loves”, “compatibility”, “lovely”, “romantic” and “marriage”. (You can also go ahead and exclude more to find more, like ~love -love -compatibility -romantic and so on.)

*The same group who sent this letter to Google some years ago.

**However, even though Google calls this the synonyms operator on their help page, it’s often more of a “related words” operator.

[Thanks Simon!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google's Synonym for Scientology: "Cult" | Comments]

Google China’s Travel Help Map

Parts of China are covered in above-average snow recently, making it hard for some to travel for the upcoming Chinese New Year festivities. Now Google China features a special layer at Google Maps: ditu.google.cn/chunyun (“dìtú” is Pinyin for “地图” meaning “map”). The page consists of special placemarks of weather and travel conditions. (Note Google Maps China misses the satellite layer, quite possibly due to local government pressure.)
[Thanks Gene Zhang!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google China's Travel Help Map | Comments]

Scientology Googlebomb

Google once said they managed to defuse Googlebombs*, but here’s one alive and well: a search for dangerous cult leads to the website of Scientology. If I understood Google and their head of webspam Matt Cutts right, then they mostly defused those Googlebombs which are made up of terms not appearing in the target page. Here we have a mixed case – the Scientology.org homepage at this time contains the word “dangerous” but not the word “cult”...

*A Googlebomb means a lot of people get together to link to a specific site, often an “enemy site,” using specific e.g. funny link text. This way, the target site will appear ranked at #1 in Google for this text, making for an embarrassing effect.

[Via Reddit.]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Scientology Googlebomb | Comments]

links for 2008-01-29

• Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile is game changing, does Flash - Engadget
  (tags: browser cell internet mobile windows windowsmobile skyfire flash flashlite)