02 January 2010

Google Goes Gaga

While working on today's post -- which is now tomorrow's post, since today's post is the one you're reading -- I ran a routine query looking for keywords on a domain:-

Results 1 - 10 of about 90 from chessforallages.blogspot.com for mainz.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Achessforallages...

After returning a few correct results, Google started to return rubbish...


...where the results had nothing to do with the query, but showed descriptions from other pages that do match the query. The same thing happened using the 'Search This Blog' widget on the Chess for All Ages blog. Ditto for other search terms. I can't remember a Google search ever performing so poorly.

What was the name of that Microsoft service? Bing! It's an awful name, conjuring up all sorts of associations that have nothing to do with web search, but I think I'll give it a try.

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More weirdness: Today's date in YYYYMMDD format -- '20100102' -- is a numerical palindrome. When was the last time that happened?

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