Robot Monkeys

I heard about these document organizers Yep and Leap, and wanted to check them out. So I google yep. I a bit surprised (but probably shouldn’t have been) that that were image results. I was a bit surprised (but again, shouldn’t have been) what the top result was.

(Yeah, its a guy with his dick hanging out.)

Top hit on Google and whatever it is Microsoft is calling their search engine this week, and Ask. Now all I need is for Yahoo to update, and I’ve reclaimed what has always been mine.

Suck it dentist boy!

It’s now nigh impossible to find anything historical information about a current topic by searching Google. Google has modified their algorithm to rank the most recently update pages much higher than older pages. Normally, this is fine, but sometimes you’re searching for something related to a timely topic, but you don’t want the timely topic itself. For example, when writing today’s post about the “stimulus” package, I wanted to find out when Bush’s $300 tax rebate occurred. I couldn’t find it with Google. All the results on the the first page for “300 dollar stimulus package” on the first page are about the current talk of the 600 dollar stimulus package.

So how did I find out what year it was?

1. Googled “300 dollar stimulus package” and got a first page full of results about 2008’s $600 per person stimulus package.
2. Remembered that Futurama had an episode about it
3. Remembered a quote from Bender in that episode
4. Googled “bender 300 hundered 1 dollar hooker bots”.
5. Found a link to The Simpsons on WikiQuote (”Krusty: Ahhh, there’s nothing better than a cigarette. Unless it’s a cigarette lit with a hundred dollar bill!”).
6. Guessed that http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Futurama was a valid url, and typed that into the browser.
7. Searched that page for “300″ to find a quote from Zoidberg (” I ate garbage yesterday, and it didn’t cost me $300!”) and identify the episode (”Three Hundred Big Boys”).
8. I look up the airdate of that episode (June 15, 2003), and assumed that year.
9. Went back to Wikiquote to add the Bender quote I was looking for.
10. Decided that it was in 2003, and that I wanted a relevant link to a 2003 article.
11. Searched for “300 dollar stimulus package 2003″ and got essentially the same results as I did without the 2003.
12. Got frustrated that all of the pre-2008 results were behind a pay wall at (Can you say “strategic alliance?”).
13. Issued at least 10 more fruitless queries for a 2003 article about the Bush stimulus package that wasn’t behind a pay wall.
14. Gave up.
15. Decided to click on a WSJ blog post from January 10, 2008, entitled “Bush Stimulus May Have Only Modest Effect.”
16. Read the first two sentences of the post:
    

    The two changes repeat similar measures taken in 2001 and 2002. In 2001, the Treasury sent “advanced payment” checks of $300 to single tax filers and $600 for joint filers.

Jesus Christ. 16 steps, at least 14 queries, an incorrect guess, and almost an hour later, I had my answer, or as they say in the IR field “fulfilled my information need.” There’s two ironies in this experinece. First, the information I wanted was found on a very recent page because apparently whoever wrote that WSJ post used Lexis-Nexis and/or didn’t have to deal with the flood of timely results from Google. The second is that buried down at the bottom of the Wikipedia page about the Futurama episode is this quote:

The idea for this episode came from George W. Bush announcing that he would give all Americans a $300 tax refund. This occurred shortly before the events of 9/11, which led to many people in the US forgetting about it.

This isn’t the first time this problem of timely results drowned out desired historical results. It’s happened a couple of times this month to me already. This is horrible. Bad results. Pay walls. This is the single worst search experience I’ve had since the bad old days of Yahoo and Altavista in the late 90’s. I’ve forgotten just how bad a bad search experience really is. This isn’t just not getting any results, and going home empty handed, this is getting wrong information, and then correcting it by happpen stance.

This is not an acceptable user experience at all.