Just came across an interesting passage in "Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain", a book about the founders of everyone's favorite megalomaniacal corporation, Google.
"It's a cliche to promise that the customer always comes first. Any corporate executive you ask will claim this philosophy as his company's own. But the sad truth is that amazingly few follow it. Ask anyone who has waited for a cable company to get her system running, or wandered the aisle of a superstore looking for the item she wanted to buy, or sat on hold for an hour waiting for a customer support staff that has been cut back because business is slowing in a bad economy. Most retail stores follow a different philosophy. They study what items people tend to buy together...But effectiveness is not measured by how efficiently customers can find the items. It's measured in how long it takes customers to wander the aisles in search of what they want, under the premise that the longer people wander the store, the more likely they are to find and buy something they didn't know they wanted. [Google is] dedicated to a simple idea: making things simple and straightforward."
Word Count: 3529
I wish Google would take this into account and get rid of the bug by which I still get erroneous search results (i.e. results that don't contain the phrase I was looking for).
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting problem-thinking about how the algorithm gets things right or wrong. From reading the book, I learned that they say that's why they collect so much information-they are constantly trying to sharpen and improve the algorithms so that the searches will get more and more relevant.
ReplyDeleteUsing that word twice reminds me of one of my father's favorite corny jokes. Did you know Al Gore was in a Jazz Combo at Harvard? They were called the Al Gore Rhythms.
I just now did a search for the phrase "to be or not to be". One of the ten listings did not actually contain the phrase. It's child's play, really to weed out such erroneous results from searches. That type of thing should be easy.
ReplyDeleteAltavista, incidentally, performs this search flawlessly. However, Altavista has far fewer pages, and they don't have caching. Google's real strength lies in its vast number of pages, and the cached results.
Al Gore. good joke :)
ReplyDelete