Google is like a box of chocolates

A couple of years ago someone suggested we should see google as a black box. We don’t have access to the inner part of google, but we can feed it input and examine the output. I still think that is a valid way of looking at it, and far more people should experimenting and reporting the results instead of guesstelling what they think will be the result.

If we go further back, to 1994, there was this movie with the now famous quote “Google is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get.” I believe it was about a google employee who changed his algorithm every few months or so. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do remember the quote. Google is like a box of chocolates.

I really think that this still holds today. If you get a box of chocolates with forms you have never seen before, you don’t know what you will get when you put them into your mouth. I like praliné, so I always hope that’s what I will pick. I absolutely hate any with liquir in it, so I try to avoid them if I can. But how can I know? You never know what you gonna get!

Sometimes there are hints. My great secret discovery is that the ones wrapped in paper are often the ones with liquid in it. And often the ones with white chocolate on the outside have a very soft taste one the inside. And that’s true for google too. If you feed an empty page in it, don’t expect to get number one for a given search phrase. But what about the other chocolates in the box? Well, they are a surprise. There’s only one thing you can do, and that’s try them.

I don’t believe that’s the end of the story though. When the google employee in the movie said “a box of chocolates”, he didn’t just mean that every time you get another completely different box. You just get the same chocolates every time for about several months. The ones you eat every day, the ones whose forms and colors tell you what’s inside them. And after those months some things may have changed. But if you aren’t doing anything weird and following the webmaster guidelines, whatever is inside your favourite chocolate should taste more or less the same. Every few months google may put a new chocolate in the box, but you still know which one to grab and which one to avoid, right?

So for me, google is a box of chocolates. I didn’t know what I would get first time, but I do know. And I like to taste the new chocolate in the box. I never know what I’m gonna get.