Guadal Canal or Guadalcanal

[GoogleGuy]

Hey, so I'm up late just surfing around and run across Andrew Orlowski's latest piece of work: Our kids deserve better than a Google™ future (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/20/collective_licensing_of_databases/). Most of the article quotes someone named Scott Middleton, and Scott talks about the poor quality of search engine results (both MSN and Google) for the query [Guadal Canal].

Maybe I'm way off here, but isn't it spelled Guadalcanal? The search [Guadal Canal] only returns ~4K results, while [Guadalcanal] returns closer to 400K, including pages from authoritative sites like army.mil and navy.mil. Plus Google returns a "Did you mean?" spelling suggestion that points Guadal Canal to Guadalcanal, so Google offered a way to correct the mistake with one click.

The final bit of evidence would of course be that great band Guadalcanal Diary. Would a band that could perform hits like "Always Saturday" misspell their name? I think not! So I'm assuming that Scott just searched for the wrong spelling and didn't see the spelling correction?

Let me know if I'm mistaken. I was just up surfing and ran across that. Since I'm in a fanciful mood, I'll leave you with a chorus from that great band, Guadalcanal Diary:

If I could have it this way I know I'd
I'd wanna live where it's like today
I'd wanna live where it's always this way
I wanna live where it's always Saturday

:)

P.S. The Wikipedia entry on the battle is especially interesting. It includes casualty numbers on both sides of the battle, and even scans of public-domain documents about the battle. Pretty amazing and educational stuff.

[Dave Hawley]

It looks like Andrew Orlowski's needs a life......and a Dictionary.

The one page that came up first was from the World War 2 organizational website, that failed to even load It loaded fine for me, but yeah Google, when a page is off-line for 10 mins or more...dump it :D
If I got those results from a simple reference to a World War 2 battle I would dread to think what would turn up on a search for AmsterdamSome sites about a city in the Netherlands by the look of it :eek:

[Chris_D]

Hey GG

I really enjoy The Register - have for years - especially having come from a PC hardware manufacturer background. But I too have found Andrew Orlowski is a bit 'light' on the research sometimes....

You'd sort of hope that M.P.W. Stone, Secretary of the Army knew where Guadalcanal was and how to spell it, wouldn't you?

By the way - what ever happened to Andrew's 'blog' search tab? :)

Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/05/09/google_to_fix_blog_noise/

[NFFC]

>But I too have found Andrew Orlowski is a bit 'light' on the research sometimes....

Agreed.

Having said that I would type the two word phrase as a starting point too. I firmly believe that it should be the user who is in the driving seat with queries, unfortuneatly the user isn't always right.

That can be dealt with in one of two ways; firstly you can over ride the user and force them to view what you think is correct. The classic example of this is the "search engine optimisation" results. Let me make this clear, if_I_was_looking_for_optimization_thats _what_I_would_type. For me it borders on insulting, I only hope for Google's sake The Queen doesn't find out about this ;)

Secondly you can try and help the user, give them a little push in the right direction.

>Plus Google returns a "Did you mean?" spelling suggestion

Thats a good starting point, but many wouldn't agree they had made a spelling mistake. I don't know about the computational costs but a "There are an additional 396,000 results for" message would work much better in this case. It would certainly grab my attention.

It seems to be often said that it is the users inability to form effective search queries that makes the search engines job harder. Lets take that thought a stage further, people who can use the search engines to effectively retrieve information have a competitive advantadge over those that can't. That applies equally to my 7 year old as it does to the CEO of Sony.

I think there is a business model in that for Google, a win-win senerio that would help educate users to use Google more effectively, would help those users, and could earn a few $.

Google Search University

A series of courses based online allowing users to be educated on information retrievel. A few levels, maybe a adademic level with pricing per class/school - an employee level aimed at those looking to move forward with their careers [the "diploma" would certainly stand out on any CV that crossed my desk] - a corporate level aimed at executives with maybe a portion of the course offline. Maybe the offline section could be tied in with current conferences, adding a Google Search University day to the current SES rosta would be a good start. Suggested pricing $5 a head academic, $99 employee level, $1499 cororate level.

[Dave Hawley]

Having said that I would type the two word phrase as a starting point too. I firmly believe that it should be the user who is in the driving seat with queries, unfortuneatly the user isn't always right. Yes, but would you have also ignored Google suggestions of "Did you mean Guadalcanal?"

I think there is a business model in that for Google, a win-win senerio that would help educate users to use Google more effectively, would help those users, and could earn a few $. They do already IMO and it's free! It's called About Google (http://www.google.com/about.html) Like they say though, 'you can lead a horse to water....

[dannysullivan]

Andrew's statement about original source material getting lost in the commentary about it (blog or otherwise) can be an issue, but interestingly, that's not what he gets into. He effectively hands things over to Scott Middleton, who wants:

Creating a hub of servers directed primarily, or even solely at the world education system would be a fantastic idea. Its not even logistically impossible. Every country now has a drive to get its populace onto the Internet in one form or another. There is nothing stopping them refining their policies one way or another or even departmentalizing it for this system and the education system.

Um, you mean like the recently launched Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/)? That seems like a good step toward what Middleton want -- though interesingly, a query on guadalcanal on Google's regular results still seems better to me that on Google Scholar in terms of educational material. As for Guadal Canal, I'd never seen it spelled that way before and would agree that if there are poor results coming it, it's more to do with this more uncommon spelling. Single word looks very good at quick glance.