Google Fellow Amit Singhal spoke at SMX London this morning. Daniel Waisberg at SMX sister site Search Engine Land liveblogged the whole discussion. Towards the end, Singhal answered a humorous question from Danny Sullivan, who asked about funny searches Singhal had come across.
The liveblog says: “Amit says that once he read a query along the lines ‘do my ear[s] make me look fat?’ Amit laughs: ‘why are you asking Google that? Go figure it alone!’”
Judging by Google’s own search results for the query “do my ears make me look fat,” I’m guessing it’s because of the meme portrayed in the top three results, which all come from Cheezburger.com:
But maybe some people really do want to know if their ears make them look fat. I guess Google won’t be getting into physical criticism of its users anytime soon, although, you can probably judge for yourself how your ears make you look if you fire up a Google+ Hangout. Perhaps there are some universal search opportunities for Google there.
A couple of us here at the office tried to ask Siri the same question several times, and just couldn’t get her to understand the question. She can’t seem to distinguish “my ears” from “my years”.