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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit disturbing that all major search engines show results for the company Apple before the fruit apple. Not even talking about ads. A search for "apple" comes up with a tech company, not the food. Seems a bit perverse especially for searches performed by those too young to have known a time when apple the fruit had a stronger association with the name than Apple the corporation.

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Why should a search engine decide which of these is more important rather than what the user is more likely searching form?

I believe search engines are in the business of showing what people want to see, not making decisions for us. (Insert remarks about google here)

99% of the time when I search "apple", I do, in fact, want searches related to the company. Now that I think about it, I've never searched for apple (as in the fruit) casually.

If it makes you feel any better, [apples] is still predominantly about the fruit.

(I mean, ads still show the computer, but I'm assuming no one is doing brand-building ads online for the fruit.)

This is a major problem with search today. It's not however a problem with the size or power of Apple. It can just as well happen with some random thing that nobody is politically concerned with.

In general, when I search for something that could be ambiguous (and everything is) I want a sample of each possible cluster or meaning. But today, Google (and others follow their lead) is determined to give you the answer, and also certain that nobody reads beyond the first few hits. It's not helpful to say "give right results and not wrong ones" because a fanatical devotion to that "idea" is what got us into a dysfunctional situation.

It's really silly for you to be offended by something as objective as the PageRank algorithm, which is essentially how search results are ranked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

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