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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

"sell" showsup in Apple's description multiple times. It's just basic SEO. Not an Easter Egg. Though Google potentially could have set the algorithm to make that be the result - but Apple just needs to change the description then to see if it holds..

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Since its a finance site, it should weigh the stock symbol over any description. Given that there is already a stock "MCX:SELL" that is also displayed at the autocomplete, the redirect should have gone there instead.

I would like to give Google the benefit of doubt but since AAPL doesn't even show up at the auto-complete, it clearly looks like a prank by an employee.

How many people are searching for MCX:SELL, and how many are searching for Apple? AAPL's trading volume is like four orders of magnitude higher than MCX:SELL's.

yes, and i bet all none of the AAPL shareholders found the stock by searching "sell" on Google finance.

I'm not going to say this proves it, but I'm convinced it's shenanigans. I can't figure out whether or not I have a problem with it. There are some good arguments why it's bad, but not good enough that I actually care. I just don't see the issue, unless I was Selestra, the company that should be popping up. Actually, if I was Selestra, I'd be pretty upset.

But then if they're using a keyword density based algorithm, and that's how the algorithm chooses to display information, then making an acception for Selestra would be 'tampering' - no?

That makes it seriously difficult for me to trust them as an objective source of financial information.

Guess I'll stick with Yahoo!

Does this really make you worry that they would tamper with information that mattered? Seems a bit far-fetched to me, doing that would be massively scandalous, and probably illegal.

If they are then they are tampering with information that mattters, SELL is a valid stock descriptor (SELL.ME, selestra corp: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SELL.ME).

Financial data sites are not a good place to be pranking your users.

That alone makes me seriously doubt that this is an easter egg, if it is google will have easter egg all over its oos.

Is this the sort of "tampering" that would have any sort of effect, positive or negative, on anything at all?

If your stock symbol can't be found? I'd guess negative, hard to put a positive on that somehow.

I suspect that if Selestra actually thinks it was a problem, they'll deal with it with lawyers. I find it hard to worry myself over it.

Thats the Google finance search box and not the Google search box.

So technically it should only show Stocks based results not keyword based results.

It seems they are just deploying a keyword-density relevance algorithm..

This can be debunked by running this query in google.com:

site:finance.google.com sell "quotes & news"

The top results is what you would get if it was a neutral algo, used by main google service.

The apple redirect is not neutral and is not a result of any algorithm.

that doesn't make sense. why would that be proof of anything? why would they do a relevance search based on the text of their own generated pages, much of which is just template and links to reuters stories, instead of over the raw data they used to generate that page?

edit: I'm not asserting that this is on purpose or not, I'm just saying that that "proof" demonstrates nothing.

That proves absolutely nothing. You talk as though you have a clue about search relevancy, but that's clearly not the case.

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