Tapland’s Scott Raulinaitis takes me to task for my loose science method on yesterday’s Google Buzz Index, and makes one good point that I agree with, and another that I don’t. My response after the jump.
He argues that it would have been better to search for just “Tapwave” instead of “Tapwave Zodiac” (no quotes in the Google query). Since the only Tapwave product is the Zodiac, that seems fair to me, and bumps the Zodiac’s results from 84k to 185k.
What he’s missing, though, is the effect that quoted queries have on Google, specifically with the Nintendo DS. While I would have made the same assumption about the results he did (that the query would return results that included just ‘nintendo’ or just ‘ds’ as well as both), if you check the last page of the search, you’ll find even the last entry still has both search terms returned, still as ‘Nintendo DS.’ While in general, Google would have returned any page that had both ‘Nintendo’ and ‘DS’ on there somewhere, in this instance it returned only relevant items (or at least as far as I know. I only check the start of the search and the end).
Anyway, not a huge deal, but while I make no bones about the Google Buzz Index being loose science, I do make an effort to be as fair about it as possible. Sometimes that means using quotes around search queries and sometimes it doesn’t — it just depends on the item.
Read [Tapland]
