Do You Feel Lucky Any More?

In Western world, we take few things for granted.

(a) When we enter a room and turn on the switch, there will be light.

(b) When we flush the toilet, drinking quality water will flow through it.

(c) When we type few words in Google search box, the most relevant pages will show up at the top. Google was so confident about finding the most appropriate link, they had a ‘feeling lucky’ button to

No natural law guarantees those three, as we can tell you regarding (a) and (b) from our experience of growing up in a communist country, and regarding (c) based on using the internet ten years back. We know that parts of USA and Europe are taking (a) and maybe (b) to the old days (see here and here), but how about (c)?

We were trying to find the direct link to Science paper of bat genome, and sloppily typed few words in Google. See the result yourself.

In none of the three tries, Science paper did not come up at the top or even top 5. Finally we figured out that giving Google fewer options works. Get read of BGI and ‘paper’ and you find the paper by BGI. Incredible !!

Not that Google’s competitors are doing any better.

Are we reverting to the old days of internet, when searching for ‘white-house’ took one to joke and porn sites first?