I was reading a sort of grammatical treatise on prepositions when I encountered a remark about someone not knowing the difference between the words “errant” and “arrant,” the latter of which I had never, to my knowledge, heard.
(I almost never use Google. Bing, to me, in spite of being from Micro$oft, does not embed advertisements posing as “hits,” but places them to the side, out of my way. Bing accepts Boolean searches, which is what this note is ultimately about.)
Back to the subject: I typed ARRENT ERRANT into the search box and pressed Enter. All of my results had something to do with arrest warrants because the string “arrant” is part of the word “warrant.” In order to rid my results of returns based upon that subject, a Boolean search was needed. A Boolean search is a little like an algebraic equation. It allows one to include or exclude specific strings of letters (or words) by specifying how the search engine is to handle your input. Some search engines will respond just as well to your use of operators such as NOT, while others will only return correct “hits” if you use mathematical operators, such as the minus sign.
Lost yet? Here’s the simple way I narrowed the search results to a more manageable herd: I added the terms –ARREST –WARRANT (the capital letters are immaterial except for clarity in this note) and pressed Enter. Bing eliminated all search returns with those words, but did still show ads at the side based on them. Go figure.
Wow, wait a minute… But try ARRENT ERRANT in Google. You’ll get no such funny return related to “arrest warrant.” Oh, by the way… no ads in this one, either. That’s because the current search terms don’t match any ad the way Bing incorrectly did; and if ads do show up (such as under search term “food”), they’re identified in a group, just like Bing. But Bing’ll give ya ads in both cases!
But try this search term: “arrent errant –arrest –warrant”, using lower case. “arrest warrant” hits still appear with or without the conditional boolean in the search term, although results differ btwn with/without the boolean conditional. Smells like a Bing bug. (Catchy!)
And, going further, comparing caps with small revealed differences, too. I’m fairly confident Bing still isn’t robust. And the anomaly isn’t browser-dependent.
Quite a lengthy undertaking for me, because the differing results confused me–because I didn’t recognize these differences earlier. I captured 6 results and compared them with each other. I was amazed that the differences were even subtle, down to the character.
Try this:
http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/search.php
It’s a Google-versus-Bing search engine. Google still is way ahead.
Better to stay with Google, friend.
Wait a minute… something’s wrong with the blank half-page (Google) result from the link I gave above. This alternative one reveals why (and that’s interesting): http://www.bing-vs-google.com/ and enter “barack obama” as the search term.
As I noted above, the CAPS were only to make them stand out in this post. I didn’t use caps in the query. I can’t stay with Google because I never started. Used it a couple of times, and I dislike the info it takes from me. I now use an add-on called TACO to intercept ad-tracking of my browsing. http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161380/browser_addon_locks_out_targeted_advertising.html.
Yes, I read that about the CAPS, but somehow glossed over it. Sorry for the misunderstanding. How you feel about google is simularly how I feel about Bing in terms of having never started with it–in fact, Google was there first. Google returns consistently correct results–and it’s still big in this day–but Bing apparently doesn’t.