i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As we have seen in class, the frequency of a term is not enough to infer the quality of the document that contains it. Recently, we have had the case of a  Brooklyn eyewear merchant who goaded customers into posting scathing online reviews, with a better position on Google searches. For that reason, Google has modified the search for that query to 'punish' that particular result. Is this good or bad?

The sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically and semantically valid sentence in English and a great example of the challenges homophony presents for IR. Although a search engine would index this as 8 instances of the same word, there are actually three variations of “buffalo”:

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