Vampires, Google and Blogs

Update – it looks like Google has fixed this bug. I guess the cheque is in the mail…

What is the relationship between blog discovery algorithms and the blood lust of Bram Stocker's Dracula? I wish I knew. Clearly, Google knows something I don't. A search for 'blog discovery algorithms' on Google doesn't return what you'd expect - pages or articles on methods for discovering blogs automatically. Rather, it returns a link to the Google Books page for the iconic vampire novel.

Drilling down into the book, using Google Books' useful tool for searching just in the book, reveals that Stocker didn't ever mention blogs or algorithms. The term ‘discovery’ does, however, appear at least once in the novel.

Any thoughts on what is going on here?

Comments

[bryanf]

As a guess it's trying to be smart and thinking blog is a typo for blood, though usually when it does that it pops up the "Did you mean" link.

A search for "blood discovery algorithms" shows the same top result, as does "blood algorithms", which is more expected given the subject matter.

[Vivek]

Well, only thing I can add is that Google book search done separately on those terms does not return the Dracula result. So, its something to do (probably just a bug) with how book results are combined into web results.

[Marko Polojärvi]

It's just Google. It's not even close to smart when it comes to things that doesn't exist in some predefined semantic or other database. I think you of all people can appreciate the myths how intelligent and smart Google is :)

[Ian]

Anchor text? Use Goodle's link search to see what points to the book.

[Adam Fields]

My guess is that Dracula "often" (for whatvever that means in this context) appears in an alphabetical book title index next to some relevant book.

[ScottG]

Also interesting...

"blog discovery algorithm" returns what you might expect.

"blog discovery algorithms" That is, just adding an "s" to algorithm, offers up your odd result.

While it's an interesting question as to how this might happen with an oddity in the Google algorithm, it could be some other simple error in indexing somehow.

Scott

[bryanf]

It's not coming up anymore, so likely an error in the index. Makes you wonder how many other errors there are in the indexes that cause interesting results to come up...

[David]

It's a joke from the Google engineer. If you are interested in blog discovery algorithm you are probably trying to suck some blood (money?) from Google... so you may be interested in Bram Stocker's book! ;)