I am the product – Canada goose isn’t a big bird any more

When I google “crane”, what I want to see is tall pointy things made of metal for shifting stuff around on building sites, not birds posing en masse in a lake. You can’t always get what you want.

A further illustration of that same principle came when, this morning, I had reason to google “canada goose”, because this time I actually wanted to learn about a bird. I photoed some lines of birds a while back, in Rye, and blog pal 6k commented today that they were probably Canada geese. And because 6k backed this up with some migration info that seemed quite informed, this sounded right, despite the fact that Rye is nowhere near to Canada.

So I googled “canada goose”.

But what I got was lots of expensive jackets with furry hoods. Even after two pages of links to stuff about the jackets, there was literally no mention of any bird.

You can’t sell a bird for a thousand quid, I guess. Or, not a bird like a Canada goose. I am not the customer of Google. I am Google’s product. Overpriced jacket sellers are Google’s customer.

However, if you google canada geese, sanity is restored. And I think Canada geese migrating is even better. It would appear from the images you get if you look there that Canada geese do often form great big mobs, fish shoal style. It can take them a while to get organised into lines.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

One thought on “I am the product – Canada goose isn’t a big bird any more”

  1. Darren says try DuckDuckGo:

    *****

    Fwiw, I searched for ‘canada goose’ on DuckDuckGo (no pun intended) and its (the bird’s) Wikipedia page came out close to the top. And, unlike Google, the images result was composed of birds, not jackets.

    Posted by Darren on 13 October 2018

    *****

    Darren

    Interesting. My sense is that Google has got a lot worse lately, in this sort of way.

    Posted by Brian Micklethwait on 13 October 2018

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