Thursday, December 07, 2006

Google Feeds My Neuroses

Just a random bit of Google weirdness that left me wondering who exactly was getting high last night.
Results of Google search for flickr+feed+viewer (Wednesday 2006-12-06 c.11:00pm CST) How did this patent application become the top result?
This is the patent application in question. It does not contains 'flickr', 'feed' or 'viewer'. The URL is a doozy, you'll have to scroll to see it all.
Results of Google search for flickr+feed+viewer (Wednesday 2006-12-07 c.11:00pm CST). The next day it's gone. But...
While this is on 'flickr' and it does have a 'feed', still no 'viewer'. And not exactly relevant either.
I'm not sure why this sort of thing fascinates/annoys me so greatly. Some part of my brain wants more weird data points like this, thinking that if it had enough outliers I would understand Google's algorithm or something. Of course, if I could correlate that many data points I probably wouldn't need a search engine as much. Then again, this could be an artifact of someone gaming the algorithm. Maybe some private Google-bomb or black-hat SEO is trying to screw with the search term Flickr? Or maybe Google is messing with the term internally now that Yahoo owns them. I need to find the Google-equivalent of Fox Mulder to investigate this for me. Anyone have any wild theories?

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