[Buddha-l] Religious violence, Buddhist violence and spelling

[Richard Hayes]

On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:52 AM, R.B. Basham wrote:

> It took a few seconds of diversion to determine that not only are some
> unaware (of 'hit count'), some live in a dream and some misspeak.

And some of us simply misremembered what we had read. I was doing an experiment very much like the one R.B. reported and discovered very quickly that the Google default operator is not the Boolean OR (union). Before I could report my results, R.B. reported his and saved me further agony. What I found was that searching for websites that mention both George W. Bush and the Antichrist are only 289,000 in number, whereas websites that mention only the Antichrist are some 7 million in number. Using no explicit Boolean operator in the search and simply typing "George W. Bush Antichrist" yields 353,000. I'm not sure how to explain that. Can you explain it R.B.?

I also think there is a possibility that Google has changed its default Boolean operator during the past year. When I searched for "George W. Bush Antichrist" about two years ago, I really did get more than 7,000,000 hits. Now I get the much more manageable 353,000 reported above. (I plan to spend the day reading them all.)

> clusty.com which uses a limited web-search presents results organized by
> content

I love that search facility.

R.P.