Typophile - Google funny, or Google Ha Ha? - Comments

Oisín, my quoted results

aszszelp — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 01:20:09 -0700

Oisín, my quoted results were without quotes as well... Well, Google does some very weird stuff, I guess also your personal settings (as e.g. preferred language setting in your browser) will have an influence on the result as well.

But if you put “Safari

Oisín — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:18:04 -0700

But if you put “Safari font embeding” in quotes, you get only one result: this page.

It seems David was comparing the correct spelling in quotes to the incorrect spelling without quotes. Not so strange things looked odd, then.

Searching for both strings without quotes gives me 310,000 results for the correct spelling, and only 1,360 results for the incorrect spelling, which seems more reasonable.

If you put the terms in

Mark Simonson — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:54:23 -0700

If you put the terms in quotes, you will get the same results as David did (except now there are two results returned — this one and the German one).

Perhaps Google assigns less

canderson — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:09:09 -0700

Perhaps Google assigns less “weight” to a term when it thinks it is misspelled. Searching “safari font” brings back 600K results. In this case, it’s actually finding lots of cases where the word is misspelled within the indexed pages. That somehow complicates the matter.

What kind of idiot misspells

pattyfab — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:45:52 -0700

What kind of idiot misspells font?

Probably has a lot to do

jselig — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:30:02 -0700

Probably has a lot to do with people’s typo’s and not a google error.

For me the figures are more

aszszelp — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:22:09 -0700

For me the figures are more like 38.000 vs. 380.000, but yeah, you’ve got a valid point there.

[edit: typo]

Google funny, or Google Ha Ha?

dberlow — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:10:57 -0700

I search google on ’safari font embedding’ and get 1 (one) find, of a German language link...

I search google on ’safari font embeding’ (and it asks me if I mean ’safari font embedding’), but in any case, it gives me 360,000 matches, or 359,999 more on the wrong spelling.

Hmmmmm.....

Cheers!