When searching within Google for localized terms by state, such as “loren baker maryland” or “ben franklin pennsylvania”, Google will automatically return search results with the abbreviation for the state name.
Sometimes however, these abbreviations can be misleading and have different meanings. For example, if I search for someone located in the state of Maryland within Google, Google will truncate the term Maryland into MD, and return search results with MD in the title or content.
As an example, say I was searching for someone named Shashikant Patel who lives in Maryland. Google sends a page full of results which are relevant to the term “Shashikant Patel MD” … MD or M.D. as in Medicinae Doctor, Doctor of Medicine, not Maryland:
Sure, Shashikant Patel may be a common doctor name, but I found this searching for the name of my friend, who is not a doctor. Google gave me a list of doctors from all around the country instead of the localized Maryland results, which were buried.
If you have found any other Google abbreviation mistakes, please feel free to share them in the comments.
Comments
8 responses so far ↓
Eric Martindale on Feb 18, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I had a programming project once where I had to go and scrape the contents from a phonebook directory, parse according to a regular expression, and generate Comma-separated files filled with the results, with everything in the correct column.
While I never had time to make it work 100%, I can attest to this being a _very_ difficult challenge. Out of batches of 500,000 records, we’d get a decent portion of… doctors who use their “M.D.” in various fashions, breaking my algorithm.
Oh, and we parsed based on street name and location, returning all businesses with an address within a certain mile radius of a central location… a road could be “Google Street” or it could be “Google St.” - or someone’s company could be named “Google St. Paul”.
Give Google a break, they’ve got a very tough job.
Search Engine Optimization Journal on Feb 18, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Wow! Great catch! That is certainly a big mistake on Google’s part and can definitely adversely affect SEO efforts for many people. That is something that should be fixed promptly and it’s great that you caught that. Thanks for sharing with the rest of the SEO community!
Tanya Eldert on Feb 18, 2008 at 4:56 pm
As you discovered, Maryland is a difficult state to search based on its abbreviation. I personally think it is nice that Google will automatically search on the abbreviation when your typing in the state, in most cases it is helpful and saves you from having to list out lots of terms when search.
Here is a hint for Maryland. Go into advanced search and put the term MD in the terms NOT to search for, it may eliminate some listing you could have used, but it will also narrow down your results because they will be with the full spelling, not the abbreviation.
Xianhong on Feb 18, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I think Google can fix that if we report the mistakes to google.
Egyptian Mau on Feb 18, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I agree, we should tell google about every problem that have, so we can have a help them become richer and richer.
Philadelphia SEO on Feb 19, 2008 at 10:54 am
I’ve noticed a number of quirks over time with Google’s local search results. For sponsored search results, I’ve witnessed Google taking certain ‘liberties’ with place names - often lumping outlying city names into that of the nearest metro area. For example, a search for Lawyer Philadelphia might returns results including lawyers in West Chester, PA - a town quite a distance outside of Philadelphia - and vice versa.
Most recently, I’ve witnessed significant spamming of Google Local Business Results. A search for Web Design Company Philadelphia returns a company based in Dallas and India as the #1 result! This particular company has simply added a listing to Google Maps using a bogus Philadelphia address. Interesting.
Franz on May 13, 2009 at 7:16 pm
Easy: tell your friend to move to another state, or don’t we all know that Google is too powerful to go against ;-)
But seriously: this is why search engines like Wolfram Alpha or eyeplorer will become relevant, we urgently need more semantic searches: I once had a 30-day trial of a news feed that used simple brute force tactics: whenever the “pope” was in the news it put it under Vatican, even though that led to articles about the grandson of a certain Mr. Pope donating a public park to his community to be listed under Vatican news. When I let the trial expire they asked me why and I wrote “The Holy see is not what you get” (with examples), but even then … they didn’t get it. Now, they were humans (I suppose) - how is a computer meant to figure?
Google Adsense on Jun 4, 2009 at 10:04 am
I have had a few graphical spikes in my visiting … not quite traced the source as the visitors didn’t buy anything - so my assumption was that the spike was in error through some misunderstood keyword anomoly.
Google, as poweful and capable as they are, will always suffer from such anomolies. Sadly they’ll not benefit us in any way. Someone Searching for Fred Bloggs the plumber in Maryland is unlikely to find benefit from a Medical Doctor’s website…
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