Archive for August, 2006

The History of the French Military

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Well, how did this happen? A strange algorithm miss, or does Google have anything to say about the history and competence of the French military?

Of course the algorithm is based purely on what others has searched for?

“The Giant Cock”

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Well, your NetNanny software can’t stop them all. Imagine your kid googling for the harmless term “giant teddy bear” (Swedish: “jättenalle“). Well, doing that in Swedish will cause Google to ask: “Did you mean: “Giant cock”? (Swedish: “jätteballe”).

Clicking that suggestion will return a number of not so harmless websites… :)

Google has been said to remove all “sexually related” automatic suggestions, but they obviously missed this one!

The Miserable Failure

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Well, I start with this one, the most classic of all Google results. You all know it by now, but when you search for “miserable failure” on Google, the first result that shows up will be the biography of George W Bush.

How did this happen? Well, as most techies know, this is the result of one of the most famous Google algorithms. Google analyzes the text in each link and uses that information to understand what the page linked to is all about.

So, by creating many of links to Mr. Bush, from many different sites but with that same link text (“miserable failure”), a number of people (probably a bunch) have managed to make Google believe that the biography is actually about “miserable failure”.

Classic. Any really funny. :)