Java Jive

In a, um, discussion of search facilities for Second Life, the question of "coffee pot" came up.

The old SL search simply looks for entries that have any of the words you type, presumably avoiding or including entries marked "mature" depending on your choice, and orders the results by traffic (hence the obnoxious phenomenon of camping), so a search for "coffee pot" is liable to turn up many establishments having more to do with marijuana than with the production of coffee, and indeed, one person tried searching for "coffee pot" with the old search, and said the result was "junk".

In the following discussion, this claim was made:

If you were to type "coffee pot" into Google, it would [sic--I presume "wouldn't" was intended] turn up anything for you in Google you needed, either. You might have to put in a different term, or more terms.

I couldn't resist... so I handed Google "coffee pot" (without the quotes, thus giving Google greater leeway to make the same kind of blunder the old SL search made) and clicked to get the results.

Here the first few are, in the order they appeared:

1. A link to an amazon.com page advertising a coffee pot.
2. The Wikipedia "coffeemaker" page.
3. Howstuffworks "How Coffee Makers Work"
4. How to brew beer in a coffee pot
5. How to brew a pot of coffee
6. Two links to sites advertising coffee makers
7. A page about tourist attractions in the shape of giant coffee pots.
8. A page about one such tourist attraction in particular.

That's the first page of results. If you want to buy a coffee pot, there are three useful results, one of them being the very first one. Even if I were desperate for a coffee pot, I'd be likely to go look at the others, both out of curiosity (beer in a coffee pot?) and to better use the coffee pot I buy once I have it.

Google is looking pretty good to me.