Thursday, February 16, 2006

Is Google Preventing Analysis of Their Search Results?

Robert Scoble has been doing an experiment over the past few days where he asks his readers to include a simple non-existent word in their blogs in order to create a new meme: brrreeeport.

Some initial findings can be found here:

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/02/15/brrreeeport-crazy-and-more-search-engine-lies/

Now I don't know the full story, but Google is apparently no longer serving up any results for the term "brrreeeport". Is the DNE (Do No Evil) Gang worried about Robert's findings surrounding the accuracy of their reported search results? (In other words, it appears that Scoble's experiment is calling them out on the fact that they inflate the reported number of search matches)

Where did all of the brrreeeport matches go?

UPDATE Feb 17, 2006 8:00AM EST: I checked this morning, and the 22,700 results are back online from the main Google web search. But, since you can only have a maximum of 1000 results returned for any given query, how can anyone verify that there are indeed 27,000 real matches for "brrreeeport" in the Google database?

They're Back!