A Google search adventure

I recently decided to perform an experiment. I felt I would see what kind of responses the search engine Google would bring for an abstract statement verses a common phrase. These phrases were ‘tilapia recipes‘ (abstract) and ‘walk in the park’ (common). The results were interesting. ‘Tilapia recipes’ received about 224,000 hits in 0.11 seconds. ‘Walk in the park’ received about 67,400,000 hits in 0.10 seconds. This is an understandable result, due to the fact that ‘walk in the park’ is a much more commonly used phrase in the English language than ’tilapia recipes’. The first result for ’tilapia recipes’ gave me, as to be expected, a link to a site titled ‘Best Tilapia Recipes – Allrecipes.com’. In fact, after clicking through all 41 pages of this search engine, I never found a single link that took me to anything other than either recipes for tilapia or another site that takes you to them. The surprising results were actually from ‘walk in the park’. The first result was from a walking event at Six Flags theme park. The following links were from several other genres, such as song lyrics, online games, Australian labradoodle fan sites, and blog entries. The list, obviously appearing rather random and covering a wide range of options, was assumed to continue this way, so my experiment ended there. My ending hypothesis is: the more abstract a query is in a search engine such as Google, the more specific the responses will be.