Single-Letter Google Hits / taint.org: Justin Mason's Weblog

Single-Letter Google Hits

April 29, 2006 at 11:08 pm

Here’s what happens when you search for single letters on Google:

Interestingly I got to see the new Google search results page, with the sidebar, once. It must be in the process of rolling out…

Noirin said,

April 29, 2006 @ 11:47 pm

Damnit, I’ve been getting that results page for ages now - at least a week. All the damn time. I wish I could get rid of it - I find it a much less good use of space.

And the ads at the bottom mean I forget that there’s a second page of results, if I haven’t found anything useful in the first.

Wanna swap? You can have my new Google, and I’ll take your old one :-)
Tony Finch said,

April 30, 2006 @ 2:58 am

L’Europe
Justin said,

April 30, 2006 @ 1:31 pm

Tony — that occurred to me, but the page is entirely in english, and there’s no sign of “l’Europe” or anything similar there; ditto in the Google cached copy of that page. I don’t think that’s it.
Justin said,

April 30, 2006 @ 1:35 pm

Ah, I’ve got it. While the coe.int page may not refer to “l’Europe” itself, many links from other sites to it probably do.
David Malone said,

May 1, 2006 @ 10:06 am

Single digits produce some weird results too.
Aaron said,

May 4, 2006 @ 6:22 pm

L has now changed. International Herald Tribune, L’Oreal, L-3com.com have all jumped ahead of the Council of Europe.

The IHT is still strange, though.
mark said,

May 12, 2006 @ 4:29 am

I’m just confused as to how “s” results in McDonald’s.. weird! :D
Justin said,

May 12, 2006 @ 10:34 am

mark — “McDonald’s” — Google’s tokenizer considers the apostrophe to be a word-break, so treats “McDonald’s” as two words:
- “McDonald”
- “s”