While building our home, I was often searching for unusual information. There are three places where we do not have gutter downspouts because they would be very ugly attached to the pine porch posts.(Two of the corners are shown in the photo above.) Rain chains are an alternative to downspouts. I have started to make some using the remants of electrical wire from the building project. Unfortunately, the first prototype chain is not doing a very good job.

One can waste a lot of time trying to find information but "reverse engineering" a search engine (figuring out how it finds the good stuff) can reduce that time and lead to a more helpful set of results. I decided to explore the stemming and subsearching behaviors of Google. I also noted the different advertisements that appeared on the right side of the results screen. Although infrequent, advertising links can sometimes provide helpful information about the topic of interest.

All queries were tested in Google's advanced search mode.

• Query 1: I entered the phrase rain chain with two individual "must include" words: copper and wire

  This search produced 21 results. Only 16 were displayed with an option to see the remainder. From this set, I assigned the top 10 the letters A through J.

  Seven sponsored links appeared on the first page of results. To track these, each was assigned the order they appeared in this search using the numbers 1 through 7. With the exception of Looking for Rainwear? (sixth) the links were to sources for industrial or jewelry-making wire.

• Query 2: Individual words were entered in the "must include" box. I was just curious if not using the phrase rain chain affected the results.

  Used in this order: copper rain chain wire and Wow! 9440 results! The top 10 were in this order: E, A, C, D, H, B, F, G, J, and (new) K. "I" did not make the top 10 list!

  The sponsored links on the first page of results included 2-7 from the first query. However, when I went back to repeat this, I got 8 ads on the first page. When I clicked to view the next 10 results on page 2, the ad on top was gone and each of the others moved up.

• Query 3: From Query 2, I selected "search within results" by adding rain chain as a phrase. This shortened the results list to 21, 16 displayed with option offered to see all. Comparing the top 10 order with Query 1: A, E, H, B, C, D, F, G, J, and I.

  The sponsored links on page 1 were in the 1-7 order identical to Query 1.

• Query 4: Four search words were entered into the "must have" field: rain copper chain wire.

  This provided 9600 results with top 10 order: A, E, B, C, D, H, F, G, K, and "new" L. The seven sponsored links were in the 1-7 order identical to Query 1.

• Query 5: Searched within results of Query 4 by adding the phrase rain chain. This provided the same number of total and displayed results as Query 3. Top ten order was A, B, E, H, C, D, F, G, J, and I. All 7 sponsored links appeared on the first page in standard order. When I peeked at the second page of results, the #1 ad was not shown but the others were in 2-7 order.

Midway Evaluation

So, one can limit results by either using an appropriate phrase in the beginning OR do subsearching after one receives a ton of responses. Based on the slight "fuzziness" noticed by the types of ads offered, I refined my phrase to get even better results!

Although quite minor, the plural phrase rain chains may help make the number of hits more realistic. Few places have just one rain chain as a substitute for gutter downspouts. While I'm brewing up an alternative search scheme to test stemming, I'll add the words gutter and gutters into the mix.

Since I tested 8 permutations, the results are in a table below. My goal was to get the list of resources down to a manageable size, but not so few to stunt our creativity about using the leftover wire! Since I am convinced I want to use the copper wire, I'm revising the phrase to copper rain chain(s). Here is a table of results.

Must have phrase/individual words	gutter, wire	gutters, wire	gutter (did not include wire)	gutters (did not include wire)
copper rain chain	3, 2 shown	2	24	13, 7 shown
copper rain chains	6, 4 shown	5, 3 shown	104	88

The advertisements associated with the searches that excluded the word wire were all for gutter suppliers or parts or raw materials for gutters. Although none of the ads posted were interesting enough to follow their links, they were more pertinent when the words gutter or gutters were used. Ads included the word in the singular or plural regardless of the search word's singularity or plurality! So, another way to tell if the search is not quite as sharp as it could be is by the pertinence of those pesky ads. If they're good enough to tempt you to take a look, then you're just the customer they'd like to have visit!

 

Conclusion

Before anyone starts thinking they can effectively "google" anything, reading the basics of how results are found is essential. The Basics of Google Search helped me learn that stemming is not used to provide more accurate results. While their example was airline OR airlines, testing it with my own words convinced me how important it is to have top notch search terms. Although a desire to experiment is helpful, searchers must try to get a good top 10 list (20 or 30 is OK too) before settling on terms that are not helpful. Had I done this six months ago, I might have had found the best do-it-yourself instructions and had those rain chains constructed and hung!

This chart, part of our INLS 102 class reading, appropriately described Google's sub-searching capabilities as "sort of." The top 10 from the searches from the use of more appropriate terms (rain chains) were better than the top 10 from a list of 16 or 21 hits.

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