Through an interesting set of coincidences hits for the google query “hate Tom Owens Cornell” turn up my old blogs’ achives. Tom Owens is currently a professor of BIOG101, one of Cornell’s biggest freshman classes.

It turns out that the following two archived articles appear on the page:

Grrrr. SEO. Hate this.

They insist. I must put a link to them. FINE. Can you imagine? To get listed in their directory one of them requires that I link to them! Do they really think a…

A two-way split

Or, I feel like thinking about organisms as operating systems. Today our BIO 101 professor, Dr. Tom Owens, presented a hierarchical overview of life. Top to bottom, it reads: biosphere,…

So, together there’s a mention of both words–however, I do not hate Tom Owens, and think he teaches a tough, but good, freshman class–contrary to whatever google results may indicate. So, to the 5% of the people reading my blog who may have a dislike for Dr. Tom Owens

you’ve come to the wrong place

This brings up a more interesting question–how do you avoid getting those kinds of mixted up queries? If I put “Today I kill a spider” next to “Mr. President will soon be elected,” will google create a situation that might cause the Secret Service to come knocking on my door? Query mishmash seems like a problem with the way google searches are implemented that will become increasingly irritating as the volume of information on the web increases. Fundamentally they’re an indexing problem, a semantic misunderstanding–but they could get you fired or investigated.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2004 at 12:08 am and is tagged with google results, hierarchical overview, freshman classes, tom owens, google, freshman class, bio 101, dr tom, professor dr, mr president, coincidences, secret service, mishmash, misunderstanding, top to bottom, archived articles, dislike, cornell, organisms, contrary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.