7
votes
Why does this happen?
A photographer I knew passed away, and I was trying to see if there was any information. This was the top result I got on google. The part after the ellipses says “killed in a plane accident in Pantanal.”
He did not die in the plane accident! That’s another piece of Brazilian news, about the architect Kongjian Yu. The search result is even tagged with Yu’s Sponge City/Cidade Esponja.
So why is this showing up for a post summary about José Bassit? There’s nothing in the post comments or the post itself saying anything like this.
Basically search engines index whatever is on a page at the time it was crawled, and present a mini summary showing bits of the page that contained your search terms.
In this instance, part of the page contained the photographers name, and another part contained the word "morto". This other story was present on the page at the time the page was crawled/indexed, likely it was trending/suggested/related, etc.
But the first half of the comment is accurate to the post, which (as far as I can tell, having seen the post minutes after it was posted) never said anything about Kongjian Yu.
That's probably suggestion algorithms at work. Things like geolocation, language, user specific curation if your logged into Instagram, etc. Basically think of the other stories like recommendations/ads. They aren't necessarily going to be the same for every person, or even the same if you reload the page. What you see and what the crawler sees are often not exactly the same.
I have this problem with reddit results in Google. Often some suggested/trending post title will hit my search terms perfectly, and then I'll click the result to find nothing related to my query anywhere in the page (because it was part of a recommendation, and I'm not seeing what the crawler saw).
This, because algorithms of the searcher's own information (on that device) play into how results are calculated.
I believe Kagi negates a lot of that algorithm bs, but I always forget to use it until I'm frustrated like the OP. (Also I don't pay for it, so I feel the need to hoard all the uses :)
Here is a Facebook post from the same group with the quoted Kongjian Yu story. It's likely that at the time the page was crawled, this headline or a snippet from it was featured as a related post on that Instagram page.