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Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Googling the Ivory-billed Woodpecker?

John over at Birds Etcetera is using Google to determine the importance of various terms and people in the Ivory-billed Woodpecker debate. Unfortunately, this approach probably doesn't mean very much. For instance, by Googling the terms Ivory bill Texas he gets 199,00 Google hits, while Googling Ivory bill Arkansas only gets 147,000 hits. Likewise, Googling Ivory bill Sibley gets 76,900 hits, Ivory bill Audubon gets 124,000 hits.

Unfortunately, this probably has more to do with the overall significance of the search terms in general use, rather than how they are related to the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. As an example, Ivory Bill Tomato gets 144,00 hits, Ivory Bill Dishwasher gets 58,000 hits, and Ivory bill porn gets 288,000 Google hits. Are these results more likely to tell you that the IBWO is obscene, or that the Google hits results don't mean much?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ivory bill porn

Rob! You saucy minx!

-Paul G.

Unknown said...

I couldn't agree more with your comments. It seems silly to assign significance to the number of hits from a Google search -- and your silly searches were hilarious!

Anonymous said...

I agree with Liza above and do not understand what the significance is about the Googles searches - your searches are just as relevant!!! Really like your site!! Cheers.

Bill Pulliam said...

What it tells me is that somebody musta had a slow day at work...

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