Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Paul Hankson test for Search Engines - Google Rules

After listening to the excellent book by Tim Geithner, Stress Test, I googled for Geithner's predecessor as Treasury Secretary, Henry(Hank) Paulson.
Just that instead of typing Hank Paulson, I typed Paul Hankson- a simple transposition error, which I should have been forced to correct. But lo and behold, the God of search engines seemed to have read my mind and gave the correct result. The very first link was for Hank Paulson.
Thinking that this must be a standard error made by many, and not willing to elevate Google to God status without giving a fair chance to its competitors, I ran the same search on Bing and Yahoo- both failed miserably. Have a look-

Google Search for Paul Hankson


Bing Search for Paul Hankson

I had to tell Bing I was really looking for Paul Hankson- which gave me the following result-

Yahoo search for Paul Hankson

As in case of Bing, I had to tell Yahoo that I was definitely looking for Paul Hankson, to get the following result:

How does Google do it?
This is both amazing and scary. It is almost like Google has found the secret sauce to make AI, while others are still working mechanically on indexing the web pages.
Google is at least a few order of magnitude better than its competitors. The more we search on Google, the better it gets, so this is a positive feedback loop which will probably end with the creation of artificial intelligence of sorts.

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