Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Chinese Search Engines

EverBabe has been reading Scott Adams blog
recently, and turned me on to it. In style, it's similar to Dave Barry in that it makes you think while you smile, but better in that it is free, updated daily, and wanders a bit more. Where good Barry columns are like good Seinfeld episodes, with 4-5 different topics weaving together for one big exciting conclusion, Scott's tend to focus on one issue, with a few really 'gotcha' moments.

In today's, he talked about the news that Google will be blocking some search terms from Chinese web surfers (you know, like 'democracy' and 'booty call') One sentence caught my eye:
The Chinese citizens are missing a lot of good stuff. Most of my favorite web sites would blind a Chinese potato farmer. I just Googled the word “sex” and got 243,000,000 results.
I thought that he was being facetious, but when I searched from work (where I am, because I am retarded), when *I* Googled the word "sex", I only got 202,000,000. Which although PHENOMONAL, (I mean, seriously - 30+ pages for every man, woman and child?) is 40 BILLION less than his. Why are my search results different from his? It's the same Google, right?
If you don't mind, search and post your results. Maybe it's location specific?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Google - 392,000,000
Yahoo - 436,000,000
Lycos - 75,540,000

Sean said...

Is that in Puerto Rico? Man... they get MUCH more responses than we do...

Anonymous said...

Well, Google doesn't always return the same results for different people. For instance, when *I* Image-Googled for a picture of my cartoon heroine Kim Possible, the very first image was a fan-drawn pornographic scene. Whereas when I pointed this out to a friend and he repeated the search, that pic was not the first result - although it was on the first page.

Anonymous said...

I like your porn per person statistic. While really meaningless it's very funny. =)

-Jody