Google Weed

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Sativied

Sativied

Ruler of the Whorled
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Just wanted to express my annoyance about google including (and bolding) weed in search results when searching for cannabis in combination with other keywords. If there are results in which those keywords and weed is found, but no cannabis, it still includes them. While most of them are not about cannabis but "weed", as in unwanted plants. It doesn't do that for pot and mj. Not cool.
 
tobh

tobh

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Email them and tell them you're unhappy with your user experience. Their algorithm is incredibly powerful, but as most things technological, is far from fool proof. They're a reasonable company and are actually a leading factor in UX development at this point in time, so you might be able to rectify some kind of change through simply emailing them.

The problem isn't even with their algorithm, it's the fact that weed is thrown around so easily as a synonym for cannabis. It's not google's fault that stoners call it weed and their web crawlers categorize cannabis in the same arena as unwanted plants (though cannabis is considered an unwanted plant to many). It being bold simply means it's a commonly searched for term. To avoid confusion during search results, refine your queries and perhaps use the plural "weeds" instead. For instance:

Unrefined search: "How to I eradicate a weed in my yard?"
Refined search: "kill weeds <insert locale>"

The first will probably show you 100,000 results including a ton of how to's for making pipes, bongs and awesome grass pics. The second will potentially lead to 50,000 results more specifically discussing weed killers, herbicides and organic methods of weed control. It's all in the context and construction of your query.
 
Sativied

Sativied

Ruler of the Whorled
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I posted this in smoker's lounge because it's not a serious enough issue so no I'm not going to contact them about it. And let's just say I have a fairly good understanding of how google works.

The bold words in search results are the matched keywords.

For example, google for:
sunn-hemp mosaic virus cannabis .gov

Notice several results do not contain cannabis as a keyword but "weed" or "weeds", and not the type of weed we're talking about.

I'm not talking about that last thing particularly though, that it obviously doesn't differentiate between weeds and weed as in cannabis. And not about including non-cannabis results either, since I didn't use sunn-hemp mosaic virus +"cannabis" .gov.

It annoys me because cannabis is not a weed, that is a derogatory nickname. This wasn't always the case in the results either. But with so many people linking to that grow weed easy site filled with grow myths perhaps that had a bad influence indirectly. When someone is looking for the phrase I used as example there is not single authoritative source that confuses cannabis with weed or weeds, only google itself.
 
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