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Google's Broken

The kindergarten continues, with my first multimedia practical being an exercise in searching the web. Unfortunately Google seems to be broken in one very particular respect, which just happens to be needed to complete the assignment. The question reads:

Find websites for the following:

An irish[sic] site that links to Microsoft.com

The most obvious search is link:microsoft.com with the radio button for search pages in Ireland checked. This fails to find Irish pages; it returns the same results as with the entire Web button selected. I tried link:microsoft.com site:ie. This gives sites in the top level domain ie, which is a reasonable approximation to Irish sites. No dice. It finds examples of the text "link microsoft.com" in Irish sites, rather than links to that domain.

At this stage I was running out of ideas so I settled for microsoft.ie which has a soft redirect to the main site so is technically correct but a bit of a cheat. It's not quite the cheat it would have been if I simply gave the URL for this post as my answer. If anyone has any other suggestions I'd like to hear them.

Comments:
Wed, 29th Sep 2004 (15:44)

This post-grad in web searching sounds tough. I tried "link:http://www.microsft.com" and seemed to get some results. Not sure if this is what your looking for but it seemed to yeild results that had pages with links to microsoft.

by Djinn
Wed, 29th Sep 2004 (15:49)

a google 'pages from Ireland' search for Microsoft yielded the following, among others: http://www.eu2004.ie/sitetools/sponsorship.asp

by Stephen
Wed, 29th Sep 2004 (15:57)

Disregard. I just read your entry properly. It's very strange that the two search commands don't link together properly. Maybe the assignment was to point out the critical error in their system and encourage you to code up a better search engine. It would certainly get you a favourable grade.

by Djinn

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This piece was posted on Wed, 29th Sep 2004 at 11:55.

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