The most authoritative site on the web....

[brooksmoses]

Google's searches now allow wildcards. If you enter * *, you get the most general possible search, given that a single * returns nothing.

Now, in theory, what this should give is everything on the internet, in order of raw PageRank. At the top of the list, according to the theory, will be the most popular, most highly-regarded, most authoritative sites in existence.

Currently, the most authoritative site in existence is the MBTA Subway schedule.

Comments

[leback.livejournal.com]

So having just poked a bit at this wildcard search thing, I am not impressed. Isn't a wildcard supposed to represent any string of characters including the empty string? Throwing one into the middle of a two-word quoted phrase just failed to find me any hits containing the phrase itself, which seems not-right...

[brooksmoses]

Well, arguably, Google's system is based on doing word-by-word searches. And so an asterisk matches a word made up of any string, including the empty string -- except that Google doesn't get any empty-string words in its database, so that's match made only in theory.

Or so I was going to claim, until I actually tried it. It seems that a search on "this * that" finds phrases with one word, two words, three words, and so forth, between the words. And it does definitely seem wrong if they're doing that to not include the zero case. (Except that the pattern seems to be * meaning one or more, * * meaning two or more, and so forth, and so I suspect it would be confusing to try to support that and also allow the zero case.) Bah!

And they've taken out the old way of doing wildcards, which matched exact wordcounts -- it used to be that it ignored common words like "at", so placing "at" in a phrase amounted to an exactly-one-word wildcard. But they've stopped doing that now; a Google search on "a" returns results. (Specifically, aside from the stock with "A" as the ticker symbol, www.apple.com is the first result.)