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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Google is telling me that no one on its history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together.

That's probably because no one on the history of the entire indexed internet has included those phrases together.

Notice that everything found when you correctly spell it "islands" is the song. There's nothing else containing the two phrases whatsoever with the correct spelling; why should there be anything with the incorrect spelling?

why should there be anything with the incorrect spelling?

Because there are tropical islands full of palm trees that are very nice, and people love them. "I love the island" and "I love the palm trees" are basic, common sentences that you would expect to see in a review or travel blog about such an island (eg.), and it seems extremely unlikely to me that they have never appeared on the same page together on the internet.

I think there should be a lot more results with the correct spelling too, for the same reason.

Many years ago, when I listened to and explored music more, my standard method of identifying a song was to memorize two or three short phrases exactly like that, and then plug them into Google once I got to a computer. It almost always worked, and was almost always unique.

I would expect reviews and travel blogs to use fancy sentences, not basic ones.

You used to be able to use imperfect queries to get what you wanted.

Not when using double quotes to confine the search to an exact phrase.

You'd still expect it to provide the "Did you mean" prompt if there are search results that it would catch but for some small difference in spelling.

Sure but that's an add-on service to search itself. I'd prefer no results to deciding that close enough from an explicit search is fine. Just to double check I ran the exact phrase search for both phrases on marginalia which runs on a variant of the original PageRank algo albeit on a smaller index and both (1, 2) came back empty with a suggestion to rephrase.

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