David Dillard, who runs the website, Meet the Googles, posted an item in BUSLIB-L today about Google Has Rough Edges and Downsides.
This is a worthwhile reminder. Google adds new display options and reindexes pages within minutes, but the search results are not always good and too often have bizarre and annoying results.
David Dillard had his examples, and I have mine from today.
What has happened to OR? In this search I want to find articles about h1n1 vaccine being mandatory for healthcare workers - sometimes referred to as health workers.
h1n1 mandatory vaccine ("health workers" OR "healthcare workers") = 30,100
h1n1 mandatory vaccine "health workers" = 263,000
h1n1 mandatory vaccine "healthcare workers" = 163,000
That does not compute. If I remove the word mandatory, the sets are more reasonable. But I shouldn't have to do that.
BUT if I use the fancier construction -- h1n1 mandatory vaccine "(health OR healthcare) workers" -- Google has the "right" count of 289,000. Both search statements should work. We shouldn't have to do reasonability tests on our OR searches.
Problems are intermittent. A search I ran yesterday to search two sites (site:hc-sc.gc.ca OR phac-aspc.gc.ca) would not work properly. Today it does.
Web search isn't web search. Much as I love Google Books I do not want web search results loaded with book snippets. Universal search has gone too far - it's time to go back to the days when web meant web, and news meant news - or change the page display to group by source and relevance.
Searches related to - firstly this is based on search queries, rather than on the much preferred topical groupings derived from an analysis of results. Putting that aside, why are there "searches related to" regulation of pediatric nursing, but there are none for the simpler pediatric nursing? To add to the puzzle, it does have related searches for pediatric nurses and nursing pediatric. Bottomline: You cannot count on Google to help you with search refinements. Be thankful for what you get and hope that the engineers improve this soon.
Posted by Gwen at October 16, 2009 03:10 PM