Friday, November 02, 2007

What does Google mean by "books" and "literature"?

Because my personalized Google News page is set to locate stories about books & literature, I can find articles on J.K. Rowling and Russian publishers. Mostly it's very effective. However, the search function sometimes returns unexpected results. Today Google presented this article "Hospital's cost-shifting exposes bid to balance books" which uses "books" to mean business accounts and "literature" to mean scientific or scholarly research on the use of a certain medication.

1 Comments:

Blogger Laura said...

Reminds me of when I looked under Amazon's "gay and lesbian" subject section and found books by Gay Talese. This was a few years ago -- maybe they've fixed it by now. Or maybe not, if Google's still making similar mistakes!
Laura
cultivatedpages.wordpress.com

12:04 PM  

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