April 11, 2003
Weird Search String Of The Week

I don't understand why anyone would ever search on this combination of words:

impacted OR hispanic OR boardinghouses OR coinage OR embellishes

If the ORs were all ANDs, I could come up with a reason that was almost plausible. Perhaps someone was trying to remember the name of a novel or short story featuring a Hispanic graduate student who embellishes his resume and lives in a whole series of boardinghouses while writing a dissertation on the coinage of some country or other and trying to come up with the money to pay for an operation on his impacted molar. But using ORs in the search should give millions of sites with very little in common. (I just checked: "approximately 154,000". I guess that's still quite a few.) Or is there some demented dictionary program running loose in cyberspace that comes up with these searches by random selection? I get equally weird combinations every week, but not every day.

Update: (4/11, 7:30 PM)

Today's five-random-word search was even worse:

outsweetened OR elevatedness OR politburo OR dimmedness OR confessable.

This can't have been typed in by a human being. There must be some sort of crazed automaton with a large dictionary file loose on the web.

Posted by Dr. Weevil at April 11, 2003 12:10 AM