I'm Sure You Weren't Looking For This Post

Searching based on text is a difficult thing.  Sure, it seems simple: if someone types in a word, you find things containing that word.  But people don't always spell things correctly.  That leads to Google's condescending "did you mean" or "showing results for" features.  They're slightly insulting, but less confusing than returning with a page of gibberish results matched to mistyped search terms.

But then the concept can be taken to ridiculous extremes.  For instance, there's probably more people who Google "kitchens" than my home of "Kitchener."  Should Google try to correct me by assuming I was looking for a new kitchen?  Fortunately it doesn't.

But then I was at Google's app store, searching for the oddly-named game, "Depths of Isolation" (which is just a physics puzzler, not as depressing as it's name would indicate.)  That's an unusual title, and its a new and little-known game, but still, I wasn't prepared for the store's search to return this:

Yes, even though there was an app that matched my search term exactly, it gave me a page-and-a-half of popular but completely unrelated apps first.  This would seem to be the Ikea model of searching: We'll get you what you want, but we'll make you walk past everything else in the store first.

The Mind Boggles

Things I've learned during my addiction to the Boggle app:

• Someone decided it should not accept dirty words, but should still put them in the list of words you missed.  This ends up causing profanity than it prevents.
• I look up definitions of the obscure short words the game accepts, just so that I’ll feel less guilty using them to run up my score.  Yet I can never remember what they mean no matter how many times I look them up.
• When they were creating Boggle back in the sixties or whenever, at some point they asked, "should we let them count plurals as separate words."  I'm thinking they have regretted their decision ever since.
• Frustration sets in when you realize you'd be more successful if you just frantically entered random combinations of letters.
• When you try to start all your apps by shaking your tablet, you've been playing too much.
• Frustration gets worse when you can think up words that you know are real but the game won't accept (pho? trew? eid?)