Well, that’s odd. My initial attempt to Google for the quote I raised in the quiz in my previous note—and the following contains the answer to the quiz, but is intended to discuss Google, not the answer to the quiz, which can be discussed back there, or I suppose I could start a whole new note, but now I’m distracted by the Googlage—came up empty. That attempt was a search for "a greater degree than any other species" That list of five links has a lot about how humans as well as a mention of the pear and something I haven’t bothered looking up but which I’m guessing is either human or insect. Google, however, shows that these are five of eight results, with three hidden because they are similar to the first five. Clicking to see the hidden ones shows seven links, because the one about the pear disappears, and the three “similar” ones appear. One of the similar ones is, in fact, essentially the same text in a different spot, the effect of blog software allowing different ways of bringing up old entries (not this blog software, bye-the-bye). The other two are not similar at all, other than containing the searched-for text. One is a forum about US politics, and was talking about humans. The other is an excerpt, in the Guardian, from the book I was reading the other day.
Why did I pick that search? Well, if I’m searching for a quote like that, I will pick a phrase fairly long, fairly unusual smelling, and fairly central. How long? Well, I might well have clicked a little earlier and searched for "to a greater degree than any other species", which again would have hidden the Guardian excerpt, but in a group of three (or four, depending on which screen you want to believe). I also could have clicked a trifle earlier yet and picked "perhaps to a greater degree than any other species", which would have given me just one result, the right one. Usually, though, I’m wanting ten or so results, one of which is right. If I’ve narrowed it down to one result by including nine or ten words rather than seven or eight, it’s more likely I’ve introduced some sort of variation, or that the web page that I’m looking for has, and that the one result I get is the wrong one.
What do I mean by unusual-smelling? Well, I don’t know. I go by smell. I’m looking for a stretch of words that I don’t think are often used together. I could have used "Silent, in some ways reserved", which also smells unusual to me, and turns out to have no Google hits whatsoever. For some reason. Ah, there’s an invisible symbol after silent; a search for "in some ways reserved" brings up the article, in a list of only six. It turns out, that phrase is even less usual than the greater degree one, although that’s not how it smelled to me. The key thing here is that I’m looking for ten to twenty hits, not more, and ideally not less.
What do I mean by fairly central? Well, I try to pick some phrase that I think wouldn’t be left out if somebody wanted to quote the original. In this case, I thought the key part of the quote was the uniqueness of the horse, or the way it epitomizes ... whatever Ms. Smiley was talking about. I doubted anybody would bother quoting the piece without quoting that bit of it. If I had included the previous line (“it is easy to make of horses what we will”), I would probably have picked that, but as I hadn’t typed it, it was easier to pick something I did type and could copy and paste. And, since the point was to see how easy the quote I had typed was to Google for, it was unlikely (I thought) that anybody would Google by using part of the answer. And, as it turned out, had I Googled for that bit, I would have found the New Mexico Horse Council newsletter of May/June 2004, which quotes the whole paragraph, and which didn’t show up in the searches I talked about earlier because somebody transposed “greater degree”, instead typing “degree greater”. It also has “in some way reserved” rather than “in some ways reserved”, so it didn’t show up there.
Does that mean that the NMHC page wasn’t where Chris Cobb found the answer? I doubt it, myself, but it’s possible. I like to use quotes around phrases and drop down to only a handful of possibles. Another tactic is to eschew quotes and pile up words, searching for something like Silent reserved allow project ideas upon symbolic perhaps greater degree and then figure it’ll be somewhere near the top of the three hundred thousand results. And there is the NMHC, on the second page of results. And, yes, it’s obvious from a glance at the Google page that this is the correct passage—and that all the previous ones aren’t. No need to actually click through to the astronumeropsychic or victorianweb.
Now, just to be fair, let’s try elsewhere. Yahoo turns up the Guardian for "a greater degree than any other species" and "Silent, in some ways reserved", but neither the Guardian nor the NMHC rise to the top by the handful of words technique The NMHC is indexed, as seen by a search for "Silent, in some way reserved". Microsoft’s Livesearch found "a greater degree than any other species" and "Silent, in some ways reserved", and also failed to come up with anything useful in the first five pages for Silent reserved allow project ideas upon symbolic perhaps greater degree. Ask (Jeeves that was) comes up with the Guardian from either "a greater degree than any other species" or "Silent, in some ways reserved", and the latter also brought up a Knopf press release that has the same excerpt as the Guardian, but that didn’t show up in any other search. The NMHC was there, as evidenced by a search for "in some way reserved", but that’s not much help. A search for Silent reserved allow project ideas upon symbolic perhaps greater degree brings up both the NMHC and the Guardian as the first two items. So clearly Ask won that contest. Although any of them would have been good enough. Also, note that all those searches were from when I happened to make them, and the links might well be different. Heck, this Tohu Bohu might sorta googlebomb itself, in an odd way, without really meaning to.
So, if anybody got to this note from a search and is looking for the Jane Smiley quote, and hasn’t found it yet, keep looking. It’ll be there.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
I did find it on the NMHC page. The fact that Google finds this match even with the typos and word transpositions is what makes this kind of search particularly useful for catching plagiarists who are attempting to cover their tracks with the sort of small changes that will thwart a direct quotes search.
Since I had no reason to suspect that Vardibidian was deliberately covering his tracks by misquoting his source, it would have been more elegant to do the kind of direct-quote “unusual smell” searches that V. ran successfully, and it would have led me to a more interesting document. I didn’t get much out of the New Mexico Horse Council Newsletter except the quote, but I would have read the book review.
A note about notation: Google folks use square brackets around search strings, to eliminate the ambiguity about whether quotation marks (and such) are being used as delimiters or are part of the search string. So, for example, [“a greater degree than any other species”] means to type the quotation marks when you search, whereas [a greater degree than any other species] means to leave out the quotation marks. You’re doing the same thing by turning the complete search string into a link, but the square-brackets notation is still a useful one to know about, if you didn’t already.
I think the lack of results on [“Silent, in some ways reserved”] is a Google bug; I’ll report it tomorrow if I remember. Looking at the Guardian article, there are no special characters or anything in the article itself; that exact string of characters appears in the HTML file, so Google should give the article as a search result.
Btw, when I follow the second link in your first paragraph here, I get different results from yours; I have various guesses as to why that would be, but I’m not gonna speculate about that right now. Anyway, when I click that second link I get the same five as if I clicked the first link, plus two secondary copies of two of the five. The Guardian article doesn’t show up for me in either list. Which is probably also a Google bug. Odd.