The first response to my posting was a comment from Arthur Weiss (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/comment-page-1/#comment-14207).
He suggested that Google was treating coots and lions as synonyms (both are living creatures). I thought that was pushing synonyms too far even for Google. (Sorry, Arthur).
I then had two comments in quick succession from Susanna Winter via Twitter (@Mrs_Figaro). The first is at (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36714410223341568):
Moving coots from the beginning to the end of the strategy resulted in an exact match and not a single lion in sight:
Changing the order of the search terms is a trick I often use to change the order of my results or bring up pages that might be buried in the hundreds or thousands, but I have never seen such a dramatic change such as this.
Susanna's search strategy 'coots feeding behaviour', which came up with an exact match, muddied the waters even more. Perhaps there is a search frequency algorithm coming into play? Are there more searches for lions mating behaviour than for coots, but not lions feeding behaviour? I am not convinced that this explains Google's insistence on looking for lions rather than our animal of choice. Susanna's next tweet suggests what is going on (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36715389190676480):
What you see is:
So Arthur was on the right track. (My apologies, Arthur). What probably happened with our search is, as Susanna said, that Google first assumed a typo and then did a synonym search on cats. What puzzles me, though, is how Google arrived at cats from coots. Surely coyotes or goats would be nearer when it comes to typographical errors?
I have two final variations on our search to confuse you even further.
The first is repeating coots at the start of the strategy. An exact match:
Now move one of the 'coots' to the end of the strategy and Google asks "Did you mean lions mating behaviour coots":
I give up!
I thought of trying another variation. This may be somewhat convoluted but who knows - it could give some clues to Google behaviour.
ReplyDeleteMatt Cutts is head of Google's web-spam team. Essentially he is Google's lion - fighting the tide of spam that impacts all searchers. Although he should be paying attention and stopping this sort of spammy search result it may have eluded him owing to number of other spam results Google has put through lately.
Cutts and Coots could be synonymous. However mis-placed modesty may have prevented Google from showing lots of results for Matt Cutts. Instead it shows results based on how Google views him i.e. as a lion. Hence the confusion.
A possible proof of this hypothesis is if you do a search for "Cutts mating behaviour". This time you get: Did you mean: cats mating behaviour
Even more proof is the first result which is the Wikipedia article on Wild Turkeys i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Turkey
The coots result is so wild and such a Turkey that this must be the explanation. ;-)
This would be funny if it didn't have serious implications for someone wanting to search out the mating behaviour of coots for a school project (OK, so don't use Google but ...).
ReplyDeletePlease don't give up on it.
I don't know what you're on, Arthur, but can I have some as well? :-)
ReplyDeleteAt least there is a very big difference between between coots and lions and one would hope that even young school children would spot that. But would they notice if Google decided to pick up results for other water birds as synonyms?
ReplyDeleteHi, i wonder how much the recent changes in the algo are affecting this. Have you read googles recent announcement on the changes
ReplyDeletehttp://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html
Thought you may quite like a quote from it....
"Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them"
Not a lot as far as I can see. So obviously they are indeed "so subtle" that I don't notice them. There is plenty of comment coming from SEO sites. The Search Engine Land article "Number Crunchers: Who Lost In Google’s “Farmer” Algorithm Change?"
ReplyDeletehttp://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173 is a good overview of the what;s happened so far.
As commented in the article, the dreadful eHow seems to have been unaffected so far. I'll have to switch over to Chrome and try out the experimental site blocking extension.