… all y’all futzing around with it do know that some of us, like, actually use Google to do our jobs, right? I mean, I don’t begrudge any of you your fun, but don’t break the nice indexing protocols, ‘kay?
16 thoughts on “About this Miserable Failure thing…”
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Your job involves a heavy interest in miserable failures? :-p
It’s the principle of the thing, carpeicthus. 😉
Ah yes. Heard of that.
No messing around. He’s our foremost miserable failure. Who should come up? Noam Chomsky?
Google aren’t bothered by it: they say that there is no primary site for “miserable failure” that George W. Bush is displacing.
And I use google to do my job. The googlewhack “miserable failure” or the 404 “weapons of mass destruction” has not impacted on it.
Drwaing on one of the VERY FEW topics I am an expert in, “googlewhack” refers to a search term with only one result, Jesurgislac. The term you want is “googlebomb”.
(I go back to my geeky life now, ok? Don’t shoot.)
“Google aren’t bothered by it: they say that there is no primary site for “miserable failure” that George W. Bush is displacing.”
Hey, you’ll note that I didn’t say that people couldn’t do it, just that I prefer that they not break my beloved Google with their play, which in this case would be most likely to happen if they were to start expanding the game by dedicating more search phrases.
Angua, you’re right – I apologize for misusing terminology! It’s a googlebomb. (It’s just it’s more like a googlewhack on the butt for Dubya…)
Moe, basically this is geeks taking advantage of the way Google works to produce a joke result. It doesn’t skew the search patterns: the links that would otherwise result if you searched on “miserable failure” are still there, just bumped down by one.
In fact blogs have much more of a deleterious effect on Google than even thirty googlebombs could do: a serious researcher using google won’t use the “I’m Feeling lucky” button, and unless you do that, you are still going to be presented with a list of the top ten options. I don’t know about you, but I’m more annoyed when I’m researching a topic and I realize I’m going to have to wade back a couple of pagefuls to get rid of the blogger links in order to find an original source, than I am when the link at the top of the list turns out to be no use to me. That happens more often than not, and I don’t blame googlebombs when it does.
For example, the “french military victories” one is more annoying, since someone could concievably be looking ofr that for legitimate reasons.
Moe, I’m of the opinion that Google needs an “exclude blogs” function (other than the -blog operator) to make research easier.
“Moe, basically this is geeks taking advantage of the way Google works to produce a joke result. It doesn’t skew the search patterns: the links that would otherwise result if you searched on “miserable failure” are still there, just bumped down by one.”
OK, point. I wouldn’t mind a way to exclude blogs, either: weren’t they supposed to have a blogs-only Google, and if so, where is it?
Hey, I’d rather exclude all the paying sites than the blogs. But I am probably some sort of commie.
Actually, I’ve found some really good information on blogs. Right now, Tomsyl is discoursing on power generating turbines over at Tacitus (which might be useful to me if I could understand what on Earth they are talking about). I wouldn’t think the useless/useful ratio on blogs is much different than on the Web overall.
Blogs, after all, are not the home of Paris Hilton pics. Leastways, not the ones I visit, so what do I know?
For example, the “french military victories” one is more annoying, since someone could concievably be looking ofr that for legitimate reasons.
Really short term papers?
“For example, the “french military victories” one is more annoying, since someone could concievably be looking ofr that for legitimate reasons.”
Like writing novels about really weird parallel universes? 😉
OK, point. I wouldn’t mind a way to exclude blogs, either: weren’t they supposed to have a blogs-only Google, and if so, where is it?
I heard that was in the pipeline, but it hasn’t shown up yet. I wouldn’t mind being able to search on blogs-only – you get good discussions there, as MattK/D1 points out – but if I’m looking for source material, blogs too often reference other blogs and you spend five or ten minutes tracing the links from blog to blog and finally discover that the story originates in Free Republic (or, to be fair, in Democratic Underground) – and you wouldn’t have wasted five minutes on it if you’d known. Which is annoying.