Hot Searches with Lotsa Cold Leads

Computers can be amazing time savers, but sometimes they’re like spending three years and a billion dollars to buy Xerox corporation so you can make free copies.

As I have mentioned before, I will check on Google.com Trends to see what’s hot to talk about on the blog. Today, in the top ten searches overnight, I saw three references to a famous historical event; Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Tombstone, all the major components of the famous gunfight at the OK Corral

Now this is great, but I wondered, why was this a hot topic? Several of the sites referred to listed the 1994 film, starring Kevin Costner, as Wyatt Earp. Well, Costner is still alive and the actual gunfight happened on October 26, 1881, so I couldn’t figure out the relevance.

I continued to search sites only to find 3 of them giving this eloquent explanation:

“Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp:Huntington :After Thursday night practice, Joan C. Edwards stadium lights and the moon up Huntington, Marshall University football team returned to work Friday start morning . Joan C. Edwards Stadium Huntington light and the moon up.”

This is an exact quote found on 3 separate websites. Terrific reporting, kids. I wonder what language they really speak?

Just as I was beginning to think that Kevin Costner and Google were in cahoots to waste my time I finally found out what it’s all about. Marshall University hired a new football coach named Holliday. Yes, this is why the three most popular searches on Google were about gunslingers from the old west. And it only took me 35 minutes to figure it out.

IMHOToday, I wonder why, with technology so sophisticated that it can pick key words out of my email and then list related advertisements on my email page for weeks, why can't they weed out nonsensical results like the gibberish listed above or the obscure references like 16 year old movies and show you the relevant results?