The Straight Dope Search Engine is interesting. I put in “jane austen,” and the top result is,“Why do phone numbers in TV shows and movies all start with 555?” To be fair, I should have looked at the article to see if Jane Austen’s phone number was in it.
Question: how does the Straight Dope Search Engine work?
Strangely.
Reported for forum change.
Since the OP is a questions about this message board, I"ve moved it to ATMB.
samclem, Moderator
If you move the A in Austen to the left one space, and then assign the space itself a value of 5, you get a letter count of 555. A blind man could see it with a cane.
Now if you’ll excuse me I must get back to my hobby of decyphering Nostradamus quatrains.
That article answered a question by a “Mary Jane,” the next result also answered a question by a “Jane,” and so did the third. I tried searching for “Austen Kirk” and the first choice was the article about Kirk Douglas’ dimple. When I searched only for “Austen” I actually got 3 results mentioning “Austen”. Therefore I suspect that the search engine looks for the search words separately and favors the word that shows up most often.
ETA: If you put “Jane Austen” in quotes, you get the “Jane Austen”-mentioning articles and nothing else.