Google still catches me off guard sometimes. Looking at ‘online bingo’ results today, I was surprised to see this result and mistook it for Google News (cut me some slack – it was 8:30 and I’d had no coffee).
Had we written about bingo anytime recently? I didn’t recall and it seemed like a mentalist subject to blog about. Anyway, I clicked through to find this story about bingo and AdWords… from March 30th.
At first I didn’t get it. But then I didn’t get why the story was accompanied by a weird blank avatar thing. Or why, next to Dave’s name it said “connected via Twitter.com”. And then, the fogs lifted and I read the title above the link and I finally remembered – social search. Social search looks for connections between your Google accounts and such and tailors your results to include them.
Is this result a great advertisement for the feature? I wouldn’t say so. Just because I know Dave doesn’t mean I’m interested in some guff he was saying 6 months ago. Social lives move on pretty rapidly – I would have thought that ‘recency’ would be a critical part of the algorithm for anything related to the social sphere.
5 Comments
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It was relevant enough to you for you to write an entire blog post about it, Paul. So I guess they were right after all.
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Got to agree with TallTroll here. But also think your point about recency is a valid point.
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I guess they are still tweaking it. Released something to ride the Buzz.
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An interesting point here. I would strongly aggree that regency should be the most valid factor in this case.
Nice post.
>> I would have thought that ‘recency’ would be a critical part of the algorithm for anything related to the social sphere
Yes and no. Daves’ recent man-crush on Jedward is clearly a recent phenomenon, but his fondness beer is pretty long standing. Something he said about beer 6 months ago is probably still true. But SEs cant tell the difference because they are crap at understanding intent and context buy viagra.
Also, just because you talked about something recently cheap cialis doesn’t make it important. I refer you the whole Jedward thing again, loads of talk and press everywhere, but in 6 months tops, they will have sunk back into blissful oblivion, and everyone will thank you for never speaking of them again.
Sometimes, Google remind me of Data from the first series or so of TNG, trying so hard to be human, and failing so ridiculously. I bet they are even fully functioning androids, lol