What Do You Make of This?

I did a search on the internet — I used Startpage, which used to say “Powered by Google,” although they no longer advertise that.

Anyway, I was looking up the daughter of Monica Lewinsky’s main — ahem — squeeze.

One would think that, being in America, I could obtain some search results for the lone word “Chelsea.”

No.

About sixteen pages(!) of results showed me info on the football [soccer] team and the suburb of London. Not one on any human of that name. I gave up.

What do you make of this?

My personal theory is that BJ and Co. have contracted with Google to inform them when anyone searches a name of a person in their family. To streamline that process, it would save this family effort (in their basement server) if Google does not send them tons of alerts when anyone searches for any OTHER use of the name. BJ and Co. don’t want to have to sift through soccer team searches, or London suburb results, for example. To provide this pared-down, directed report, Google took the lazy way out: the searcher has to enter the family name — otherwise the search will be throttled. That way, Google doesn’t have to separate wheat from the chaff when passing on search info to BJ & Co.

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