[ExI] test for bogus googles, was: RE: phony google

[David Lubkin]

Spike wrote:

>If you entered the words exactly as I did, you should get the same results.
>Otherwise one of us, or both, have a bogus copy of Google, doing
>who-knows-what evil, such as reporting to the authorities on latex chicken
>fetishes.  Do please the experiment, just post yes if you get the same
>results, or if not, let's figure out which of us has the genuine copy.
         :
>Ja that occurred to me too: websites change, so I assume Google is 
>constantly updating.  There might be system settings and filters 
>which spring into action whenever they see the words "latex" and 
>"chicken" together for instance.

Besides Google constantly updating, Google is constantly trying changes out
to slices of their user base. And did they ever claim that a search of the
same set of web site corpus would be deterministic? Why couldn't PageRank's
current algorithm intentionally include some random shuffling of results?

Also, you can run these experiments yourself. Either run your queries in a
fresh instance of a virtual OS or in a private session in a browser that
supports it. (With the virtual OS instances, you could do some runs in the
continued context of your prior runs. Or use Firefox profiles for much the
same result.)

Instead of SETI, protein folding, or prime numbers, you could run a few
million variations and then crunch what you find.

Another hole in your speculation is your assumption that the messages
you see addressed to extropy-chat aren't fabricated by the blackhats
that seized your computer. Unless of course you're running a sly test
against us.


-- David.