Friday, October 2, 2009

Search engine weirdness

If you search on google for the string "nuc00.dtf" you get a bunch of results from "www.stamptrotters.com". Clicking on the results produces broken link messages. Looking at the results in the google cache shows them to be Westchester real estate sales records. The www.stamptrotters.com site seems to be some sort of stamp collecting club. So how did google cached pages of Westchester property records end up attributed to a stamp collecting domain? It is a mystery to me, perhaps a reader can explain.

Using the new bing search engine produces similar results.

5 comments:

  1. I get 3 hits none of which resemble what you mention. When searching for this string in double quotes I get 0 hits.
    It is possible that your search is customized if you are logged in in google.

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  2. My results using Google are consistent with those of oTUHV.... Using bing produces no hits.

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  3. Are you using the correct search string. It may not be obvious but the characters "00" in the search string are zeros not the letter o.

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  4. James: That indeed is the problem. The font used in the blog is one that Microsoft Word calls "Georgia", in which zero and lower case o look almost the same. Consider them together: 0o. Most fonts make zero noticeably taller.

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  5. Yes, I typed it in as oh-oh.
    Now, I do not know the answer to your question, however, you seem to be not alone asking it, see here: (go to stamptrotters, click on Forum, then select message "What is this?")

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