If I do an image search on the Fungal Vale, I get a handful of images of the town itself, followed by 50,000 images of houses. If I exclude real estate ads (by adding "-home" and "-house" search terms) it reduces the number of real estate ads, but does not eliminate them.
...and regardless of what I specify for search terms, I get a hundred million images which are completely unrelated. If I add "history" to the search terms, I get [Fungal Vale] Nebraska--even if I specify "[Fungal Vale] Illinois" in the search terms--and the Mediterranean island that the Fungal Vale is named after starts showing up in the results, too. Oh, and if I don't spell out "Illinois", I get results on [Fungal Vale]IL, all one word, unless I exclude that.
I end up with a ludicrous series of exclusions--excluding more than I'm searching for--and nothing related to my search terms. Maybe there's one or two historic photos, and those same ones show up in every search regardless of terms.
It's painfully simple to see that their search algorithm doesn't work. And I don't know why; when I search for something in the Fungus (by using "site:http://atomic-fungus.livejournal.com/" and adding search terms) it never hesitates to tell me when it finds no results.
Anyway, it was all prompted by wanting to know more about the blizzards which hit the area in the past. The Blizzard of '67 dumped two feet; the Blizzard of '79 dumped eighteen inches on top of an existing 10 inches. In 1918, one dumped four feet.
I wanted to see pictures, and then I got interested in seeing if I could find pictures of how the town used to look, and then the next thing I knew it was far too late in the evening (or early in the morning) for my taste.
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"Now chooses to live as a gay man" will be the new catchphrase "get out of jail free" card that I make fun of, I think, almost entirely because of that image.
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Oh, look, in my spam folder: "XXXElizabeth sexy XXX has unlocked her private video for you" DELETED!!!!!!!
...only I had to refresh the page and re-delete the spam, because Gmail has been "improved" so that it no longer works as well as it once did. Diversity hires FTW!
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This is probably beyond Googe's technical ability at this point, but I've always thought that being able to right-click a search result (or do some other operation to it) to tell the computer to exclude results like that would be a banging feature for any search algorithm. The problem is, it probably requires technology we don't have yet, especially with regards to images. Oh well.