Google and SARS

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

[americ]

If you search 'sars' on Google, it does not return right results about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, althought this word is one of the most searched this week ( [google.com...] ). It's better searching for 'acute+severe+sars'.

[edited by: americ at 8:11 am (utc) on April 4, 2003]

[rfgdxm1]

The reason is "SARS" has many different meanings in how it is used. As the others are more established, they will do better on Google. For what you want, probably you should be using Google News.

[Powdork]

That is strange given there are fresh tags mingled in with the 'sars' search. The conspiracy theorist side of me says its to get people to go to Google news, and perhaps even adwords, results. Why is Google so much slower than the general public here?

ps. The conspiracy theorist side of me only weighs about 10 lbs. :)

[takagi]

Americ, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

If you search on news.google.com [news.google.com] for sars, you will see Google knows of some 30.000 news pages containing this word. I'm sure most (if not all) are related to this new virus.

[Brett_Tabke]

The news results suggested links are highly relevant.

[news.google.com...]

[GoogleGuy]

One reason is that there is no real single page for SARS that's the definitive place to return, and SARS is an ambiguous term. If you spell it out as severe acute respiratory syndrome, then you find lots of fresh/good results.

[Powdork]

GoogleGuy I don't understand. If I put up a page titled "SARS-Severe Acute Rspiratory Syndrome" on a high ranking site that regularly has pages fresh tagged, with links pointing at it (in other words, do all the right things); why is it any different from the "My Location-Easter Brunch Menu" page that I put up and was indexed fifteen hours later type of thing? Does it have something to do with the actual term in that it's not a word? Just curious.

[rfgdxm1]

That ambiguity of SARS is the big problem. The most critical keyword for my main site is a 3 letter acronym for a common drug. That three letter acronym is also the trademark of a web design firm, the trademark of a computer hardware producer, the trademark of an unrelated computer software product, the trademark of an Italian art studio, and more. Don't be surprised if your search is ambiguous if you get a mixed bag of results.

[mbennie]

ACtually there is one site that I know of that is devoted to the SARS virus. I can't post the link here.

Problem with Google is that new sites based on a timely subject can't possibly have the page rank necessary to get crawled regularly by freshbot and can't compete against the page rank of the big news sites.

[John_Caius]

Of course the human editors at the ODP are on the ball - we've been working hard on this one:

ch.dmoz.org/Health/Conditions_and_Diseases/Respiratory_Conditions/Severe_Acute_Respiratory_Syndrome/

(using the ch extension because it's so much quicker)

That will propagate into the Google Directory soon. Who said that dmoz is always behind the times? Now we're even faster than big G... ;)

[Jesse_Smith]

:::If you search 'sars' on Google, it does not return right results about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, althought this word is one of the most searched this week

It's because SARS was unknown when the deepcrawl occured last month, though I'm suprised that the Freshbot hasn't found any SARS sites. I think something will show up after the next dance, or the dance due to occure on May Day.

[rfgdxm1]

>Of course the human editors at the ODP are on the ball - we've been working hard on this one:

This is one of those cases where a human edited directory can do better than a search engine.

[AthlonInside]

SARS is a new decease where they are not existed even in the last deep crawl! Don't even think of the current index can has SARS. Even goodgle update today, they will not have info either.

Some that appear are from freshbots. Try google news instead. It is a better spot and tool to search for news.

[cornwall]

You can also learn from Google seach that

" About 47,000 Americans, [usatoday.com]thousands more than previously thought, die each year from flu and another common respiratory virus called RSV, a study shows. "

Looks as if SARS is not as big a problem as "ordinary" flu!

[Chris_R]

Maybe they paid attention to this thread - there is now a "Google Public Service Announcement" at the top when you search for it.

[mcavic]

there is now a "Google Public Service Announcement" at the top when you search for it.

Hey, that's quite cool of them. Also, the CDC site has shown up as #2 under the "SARS" search.