Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The Job We Never Had at Google

A Google a Day:

http://agoogleaday.com/

I don't like Google's solution to today's April 12 question. But it's really just due to the ambiguity of the question itself.

My standard for top performance search answering:

- single set of search terms
- answer comes up on 1st page search results
- answer can clearly be read from the search preview, without clicking through to a website

I'd only rate myself a B on this question. It took two sets of search terms for me to find the answer. Better than Google's 3 though.

1 comment:

Jake of All Trades said...

Generally agree with your criteria for top search performance, but I always found the 2 parters where multiple related searches were needed to be more rewarding.

What's weird here is that my first search try "Rohan Robert album" (without quotes) brought me to this blog post talking about the game:

http://blog.arhg.net/2011/04/bob-is-robert-bob-marley-is-rohans.html?m=1

...but according the post Google is supposed to be defending against this if you look at the source code:

"You are searching Deja Google – A wormhole inspired time machine that enables you to solve today's puzzle spoiler free by searching the Internet as it existed before A Google a Day launched."

My guess is the iPhone redirect did me in...

(or it could be that the post author saw future questions early in the code and his plan to get indexed in advance worked...)