Google's Synonyms Goofing Up

Yesterday, Philipp Lenssen drew people's attention to the Googlebombs still ticking, like the search for "dangerous cult" redirecting to Scientology.org. Today he's returned with some further insight on the way things work with the algorithm that Google said to have put an end to the linking problem.

If you've read yesterday's news, you know by now that the way the engineers decided to deal with the bombs was to scan the linked site, for the presence of the respective words, input as the query. This left place for the possibility that, if formed out of more than one word, the search terms to be partly included on the website, making it a tough decision whether to include it in the search page or not.

By entering the "~"(tilde) character, you trigger what Google privately calls its synonyms operator and, openly, its synonyms search. To be honest, this is more like a "related words" operator, similar to YouTube's "related videos" tab. Now, after this short intro for the service, try searching for "~scientology". It will return strange results, such as "Travolta" and, you guessed it, "cult".

I'm guessing that engineers always rush ahead to create an algorithm for every little change, because it's easier for them. Now, the one they'll have to come up with in order to fix this will have to be a lot more complex because of the complications involved with the synonyms.

Why would they release such a product (the synonyms search, I mean) which basically has no real utility because of the poor results, I do not know. It is more bound to harm the quality of the work that its users want, more than help with it. Say somebody doesn't know English very well and trusts it with a very important search. I don't think that writing something like "Scientology has helped mankind in the past century. Travolta was responsible for many breakthroughs" and so on, would be beneficent.