Thursday, December 7, 2006

Google Feeds My Neuroses

[Ed Note: Just another post that felt isolated and alone back in the old one-blog days.]

Just a random bit of Google weirdness that left me wondering who exactly was getting high last night.

Results of Google search for flickr+feed+viewer (Wednesday 2006-12-06 c.11:00pm CST)
How did this patent application become the top result?

This is the patent application in question. It does not contains 'flickr', 'feed' or 'viewer'.
The URL is a doozy, you'll have to scroll to see it all.

Results of Google search for flickr+feed+viewer (Wednesday 2006-12-07 c.11:00pm CST).
The next day it's gone. But...

While this is on 'flickr' and it does have a 'feed', still no 'viewer'. And not exactly relevant either.

I'm not sure why this sort of thing fascinates/annoys me so greatly. Some part of my brain wants more weird data points like this, thinking that if it had enough outliers I would understand Google's algorithm or something. Of course, if I could correlate that many data points I probably wouldn't need a search engine as much.

Then again, this could be an artifact of someone gaming the algorithm. Maybe some private Google-bomb or black-hat SEO is trying to screw with the search term Flickr? Or maybe Google is messing with the term internally now that Yahoo owns them.

I need to find the Google-equivalent of Fox Mulder to investigate this for me. Anyone have any wild theories?

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