Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Theology, Rheology and some freaky strange search results

Dan Lowry (@DrFriction) tweeted last night "Whenever life seems devoid of meaning or humor, just do a web search on 'theological properties'" (referring to the fact that spellcheckers typically attempt to change "rheological" into "theological"). So I did just that.

Wow. Wow. Wow. Look at this screenshot:
The spellcheckers are winning far more often than I would have ever imagined.

But a little bit of digging suggests that there may be a far more sinister plot, one of revisionist history. I clicked on the first link and found this:
while at the bottom of the page there was this:
So what gives? Was the title later fixed? (That doesn't seem possible as it looks like an image capture, but I'm no expert in these areas.)

But weirder yet is what I found at the fourth hit:
Clearly an image of an original document, with a correct title. But that is not the weird part. It's when I searched the rest of the document for "theol" with the crtl-F key. Every single return (31 total) pointed to a word correctly spelled as rheol...For instance:

What is going on? I know and expect that Google would return a search for most people "rheology" (no quotes) as "theology", but for a word finder in a .pdf document to do that?

Again, I am swimming in the deep end. Any insight that someone could offer would be most helpful as there things here that are disturbing. I know my google search results are not neutral and haven't been for years, but for the text search in a pdf to be like that is not good.


Previous Years

August 24, 2011 - Review: "Social Marketing to the Business Customer"

August 24, 2010 - The Deborah and Weissenberg Numbers

August 24, 2009 - BASF as a hostile takeover target?



15 comments:

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Yes the results are disturbing like you said, but what I didn't understood is the how come the meta contents have word theology in it ?

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I am aware that my Google search results are biased and haven't been for years, but it's not good that a pdf's text search behaves that way. Clearly a copy of the genuine document, complete with the proper title.

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