Well, Google didn’t say “glarbifulous” on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word.
In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press’s preference for “Web log” is far less popular online than the traditional “weblog,” I did a quick Google search.
I expected that. For years, my own blog has been ranked anywhere from 99 to about 180 out of however many hits there are for “weblog,” and I’ve been tracking that number every year when I submit my annual faculty report. I thought that maybe that number was a little lower than I remembered, but I realize that Google’s numbers fluctuate as it re-indexes older sites.
I wasn’t surprised when I found only a paltry
… since only AP writers format the term that way. But when I tried to exclude the AP articles that use
“web log,” I found…
Why do I get ten times more hits for what should be a more restrictive search?
The Googly weirdness does not stop there. When I include AP, why do I get 25,000 more hits than when I
exclude it?
The nonsense word “glarbifulous” appears nowhere on the internet (though that will change once Google notices this post). I was quite surprised, then, to see that after excluding “glarbifulous” from my search, I find…
That’s more than ten times as many sites as I get when I don’t exclude the nonsense word. How can so many more pages NOT have a word that doesn’t exist?
Maybe Google has paid closer attention to the quality of pages that contain the word “weblog,” removing a lot of junk results that it figures are pointless. But maybe when I ask Google to do a search for something less popular, it thinks I might actually be interested in some of the sites it would otherwise ignore. Suddenly, every single page in its database that doesn’t include “glarbifulous” becomes potentially relevant, since each of those pages has met a criterion that I have specified.
That seems to make sense, but it also seems, well, twisted. I just did a search for “the” by itself, and “the -glarbifulous” and got similar results…. about twice as many hits for the more restrictive search.
I’m still not sure I’m any closer to understanding how there can be so many more hits for “any web page that refers to weblog without referring to the glarbifulous-ness of weblog” than there are for “any web page that refers to weblog”. But thanks for the help! Google really is an amazingly complex set of tools, buried under a home page that still remains remarkably simple.
>>175,000,000 hits for [weblog -glarbifulous]
Is this Boolean logic in action? You want to search for a page containing weblog and not containing glarbifulous. HOWEVER according to the Google “advanced search” help pages (I actually types “man pages” and had to go back and fix that), what Google searched for was “any web page that refers to weblog without referring to the glarbifulous-ness of weblog” Since I’m not sure what a “glarbifulous” weblog is, Google probably returns this as a Boolean “OR”; i.e., by returning pages that do not refer to glarbifulous OR that refer to weblogs.
This would be the correct interpretation of the logical phrase “not (weblog and glarbifulous)” as opposed to the logical phrase “weblog and not glarbifulous” :)
Here is the quote from the Google help page (http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/basics.html)
Negative terms
If your search term has more than one meaning (bass, for example, could refer to fishing or music) you can focus your search by putting a minus sign (“-“) in front of words related to the meaning you want to avoid.
For example, here’s how you’d find pages about bass-heavy lakes, but not bass-heavy music: “bass -music”
Note: when you include a negative term in your search, be sure to include a space before the minus sign.
Interesting observations. I think when the news was reporting this week on the BlogWorld Expo they couldn’t figure out what to call it either, perhaps they should check with Google. Scott