For instance, do a search for “women are subservient” (use the parentheses), and you get 631 results. Add a ‘-asian’ and you get over a thousand.
Huh?
Oh god, I can’t decide whether I want to ask for the backstory on this google discovery or if I’d rather just sit here and giggle.
Sorry that I don’t have an actual answer for you, I agree that it’s a bit weird to narrow down your results and come up with more sites.
Their counter is not working for that purpose and I am not sure why. You can see it if you actually click through the pages to the end of the links. The hit counter changes the whole time.
The end result is:
“women are subservient” - 900 some odd
“women are subservient” - “asian” = 697
I am not sure why the counter changes through clicks. I tried to include all found results and that is basically what I got.
These are parentheses: ( )
These are quotation marks: " "
It’s not what you think (bondage), though I admit it’s wierd- I was searching for that because I was looking for information on the concept of women being subservient to men in countries all over the world, doing the cooking and cleaning and not having a say in the household or in society- do the search for “women are subservient” and you’ll see that the first entry that pops up, and pops up all over the first page, is some site about Sikhism that mentions that “Asian women are subservient…” So, I did a ‘-asian’ when I researched.
I’ve noticed this before and it’s weird. Your example is not the only one for which this happens. For instance, in the spirit of your example, look at at the number of these results:
This returns 318 results:
“men are dominating”
This returns 745 results:
“men are dominating” -canadian
If you don’t use quotation marks, the phenomenon doesn’t happen. The minus sign takes away results like it should.
It’s because ‘-’ looks like Pikachu, and those lightning effects scare off a lot of entries, especially the subservient ones.
Yow, that was lame. I should have deleted this post, but I’m captivated by the puffy yellow goodness of that idiotic animated creature. Oy vey, I’m ankle deep in sarcasm, here.
The short answer is that the estimates of the number of hits is often just plain wrong. If you google “google counts”, you’ll find plenty of discussion on the subject.
Or so it says…
Personally, I like the Pikachu theory the best. That’s one scary little yellow bastard.
Sorry, that theory holds no water. I used the ’ ’ on the minus sing - to make it stand out; in a google search, it would just be -asian, not '-'asian.