Intriguing behavior when testing the impact of quotation marks usage in Google search results

Abstract

Internet research on search engine quality and validity of results demand much concern. Thus, the focus in our study has been to measure the impact of quotation marks usage on the internet search outputs in terms of google search outcomes distributions, through Benford Law. The current paper is focused on applying a Benford Law analysis on two related types of internet searches distinguished by the usage or absence of quotation marks. Both search results values are assumed as variables. We found that the first digit of outcomes does not follow the Benford Law first digit of numbers in the case of searching text without quotation marks. Unexpectedly, the Benford Law is obeyed when quotation marks are used, even if the variability of search outcomes is considerably reduced. By studying outputs demonstrating influences of (apparently at first) "details", in using a search engine, the authors are able to further warn the users concerning the validity of such outputs.

arXiv comment14 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, 53 references, accepted within Quality & Quantity

References in corpus (10)

• Benford's law and Theil transform of financial data
• Law of the leading digits and the ideological struggle for numbers
• Breakdown of Benford's Law for Birth Data
• Benford's law predicted digit distribution of aggregated income taxes: the surprising conformity of Italian cities and regions
• Data science for assessing possible tax income manipulation: The case of Italy
• A first-digit anomaly in the 2009 Iranian presidential election
• Long-range properties and data validity for hydrogeological time series: the case of the Paglia river
• Regularities and Discrepancies of Credit Default Swaps: a Data Science approach through Benford's Law
• Benford's law: a 'sleeping beauty' sleeping in the dirty pages of logarithmic tables
• The leading digit distribution of the worldwide Illicit Financial Flows

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Note on pre-taxation reported data by UK FTSE-listed companies. A search for Benford's laws compatibility