Browsing Tag: search-engines

    Miscellany

    Bing Has No Clue Who Matt McGee Is

    March 31, 2014

    I was Binging myself (is that what you’d call it?) over the weekend and discovered that Bing is really FUBAR when it comes to knowing who I am.

    On the bright side, Bing shows a Snapshot result on searches for my name — unlike Google, which doesn’t have a Knowledge Graph result for me. (Probably because I don’t have a Wikipedia page.)

    On the not-bright side, Bing is confusing me with some Matt McGee who’s a construction foreman in Oklahoma City.

    mattmcgee-bing

    I highlighted the wrong parts of the Snapshot in red. It’s really a mess.

    Over on the left, in the organic web results, the stuff about me is highlighted in green. So at least there’s some stuff that’s correct on this search.

    Bing, fix thy search results, please.

    Miscellany

    Google: Any Excuse to Show an Ad

    July 27, 2012

    In what world is it relevant to show a bunch of ads when someone does a site: search looking for an article from a specific publisher?

    In Google’s world!!!

    I was searching for a specific article about Pinwheel that we previoiusly published on Marketing Land, but Google ignored the site:marketingland.com part and crammed a bunch of Shopping ads at the top of the page.

    Talk about irrelevant search results….

    #FAIL

    google-shopping-ads

    Miscellany

    I Used Wolfram Alpha (and it helped)

    March 24, 2010

    About this time last night, I was working on a blog post for Search Engine Land about the major search engines and how much they spend lobbying the government. In looking over the numbers, I had decided that my headline was about the enormous jump in how much Google has spent in the past few years … from $260,000 in 2005 to more than $4 million in 2009.

    But what percent is that increase??, I wondered. That would be my headline.

    I’m adequate at math, not great. I manually counted up by 260,000s … at 520,000, it’s a 100% increase … at 780,000, it’s a 200% increase … etc. I determined that it was about a 1500% increase.

    But what if I’m wrong??!!, I thought.

    And then an idea came to me: Wolphram Alpha!! The “computation knowledge engine.” It’s like a calculator on steroids. (Note to my son if he’s reading this: It can be used to help with homework, but not to replace you doing the work yourself.)

    So, I went over to WA and tried this query: 4,030,000 is what % of 260,000. And would you look at this …

    wolfram-alpha

    How perfect is that??!! And compare it to the same query on Google:

    google

    I appreciated the irony of using some other search tool to find out exactly how much Google has upped its spending on government lobbying. It gave me my headline: Google’s Lobbying Spend Up 1,500% Since 2005.