Perverse liminality

[muckefuck]

Last year around this time when its imminent collapse became obvious to everyone, I added "Borders" as a topic to my Google News page in the hopes of getting some early notification as to when the local branch would be closing so I could make it there in time to raid it. That didn't happen. But the dedicated section of my news feed never went away, it just got odder. You see, whatever search Google is using to populate it with headlines not case sensitive, so what I end up getting is a sampling of stories about frontier issues from around the world. Which, given my interests, is kind of neat, actually. But I don't recall ever seeing a juxtaposition quite as strange as this morning's:

• Border Patrol evolves to meet the demand of Texas-Mexico border violence
• LEAD: India, China begin talks on decades-old border dispute
• Tips for a mixed flower border

Maybe I should just replace the existing sections like "World" and "Sports" with other random keywords like "Body" and "Undermine" just to see what might pop up.

Comments

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

Case-sensitive matches would make things worse, because case in English is used for multiple things. For example, "Borders close due to fighting" would erroneously match your filter, and erroneously not match one looking for just "borders".

I imagine similar problems get much worse with strongly-inflected languages, because either the search engine must be smart about inflections, or you need multiple filters to match every possible conceivable inflection.