I made a promise to myself that I would try to restrict the number of occasions I would express amazement at how search engines bring traffic to Mount Sutro. Search engines do appropriately usher visitors looking for topics and content that are relevant to articles posted, but here and there the results are unexpected.

Often more astounding to me is how deeply people will go in search results. I may go through 20–40 pages of results (depending on the particular search engine and my ambition to locate something specific) but some people crawl through hundreds — yes, hundreds of pages of results.

But I digress. The point of this article is to point out one particular irregularity brought to me by the Google shopping engine, Froogle and the user in Omaha, Nebraska who initiated the search. If you search for the term "talking spongebob patrick" in Froogle and browse to results 41–70 you will find the following entry:

Yes, the Google back-end took three completely different and unassociated items and assembled them into a product that does not exist. Now obviously nothing further can happen due to this listing, save bring a few additional disappointed visitors, but the scenario leaves me wondering what other anomalies like this exist.

Update! Another search phrase results in the same faux-product listing, the curiously offensive "spongebob squarepants condoms."

For completeness, the three articles sampled to create the above oddity are "Every Quarter Gets His Day," "STS-114" (in the Linkage section) and "Attack of the Homosexual Agenda!"

5 Comments on “For Sale: Talking SpongeBob Quarters”

1. AnnMarie
   

   I'm a little confused by that. Are you expected to pay .25 cents to click on the link and then be bitterly disappointed? Not cool.

   
   Tuesday, 21 June 2005, 1959   Hyperlink
2. AnnMarie
   

   Wait, nevermind.. I think I get it now that I read the links. I think.

   
   Tuesday, 21 June 2005, 2000   Hyperlink
3. David July
   

   Actually, when you click on the links it simply brings you here. I did not bother to go through the registration process to see what happens when you click "add to list," but I imagine it is just like Amazon's Wish List.

   
   Tuesday, 21 June 2005, 2001   Hyperlink
4. Corey Vilhauer
   

   I had something very similar on my site, where someone looking for "hamburger helmet" on froogle got my site: A picture of a guy eating a big hamburger with a price of 23.95.

   I'll admit I got a chuckle from that one.

   The link is here.

   
   Wednesday, 22 June 2005, 0902   Hyperlink
5. David July
   

   Ha ha ha! That is beautiful.

   
   Wednesday, 22 June 2005, 1250   Hyperlink

Post Your Comments