From: theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk   
      
   Don Y  wrote:   
   > I am increasingly amused -- to the point of dismay! -- about how   
   > little common sense is noted in "answers" provided by tools.   
   >   
   > Search engines, of course, are notoriously bad at allowing for   
   > criteria refinement -- the more terms you add (increasing specificity),   
   > the more results you get!   
   >   
   > But, it seems to be creeping into more "solutions" -- where the   
   > algorithm chosen simply doesn't exhibit common sense.   
      
   This is deliberate.  If you search for 'thing', it first shows you what it   
   thinks are the best matches (for you or those which make the best revenue   
   for them).   
      
   But tech companies have decided that people don't like being told 'that's   
   it, I didn't find anything else' (because you might leave the site and go   
   somewhere else, and eyeballs = revenue) so what they do is show you junk   
   that may or may not be tenuously connected to what you searched for.  You   
   get a thousand pages of search results but only the first handful are   
   actually related to your search.   
      
   The trick is to spot at what point the results fell off a cliff and stop   
   there.  When you realise this is what's happening it's quite easy to   
   identify.   
      
   > E.g., specifying "Penny's" [sic] in the GS gives me a location   
   > some 1000+ miles from here!  Does the GPS (which could have been   
   > observing ALL of my travels for the past decade -- never leaving   
   > the city limits in that vehicle!) think I *suddenly* am interested   
   > in a cross-country trek?  Wouldn't a more likely scenario be that   
   > something is wrong with the criteria I've specified (or, its   
   > interpretation of it)?   
   >   
   > "I find no destinations within a 25 mile radius.  Would you like to   
   > expand your search criteria?  Or, change the destination sought?"   
   > (instead of trying to dick with a device while driving)   
      
   That's possibly the opposite problem, that the primitive on-device search in   
   the GPS is not fuzzy enough to handle variations.  eg if the store is coded   
   in its DB as "Pennys" then perhaps "Penny's" doesn't match.   
      
   Theo   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)