Xitong Liu in Google Suggestion

2010-06-24T00:00:00-04:00

Xitong Liu in Google Suggestion

June 14 2010 – Newark

It’s amazing that I found my name appeared in the 1st place of Google Suggestion on Google’s homepage when you just type “Xito”. Here is the screenshot.

To make it’s clear that that’s not provided by Google personalized search based on user’s search history or cookies, I tested it on a new Google Chrome’s incognito window¹ which means I’m not a signed-in user and there is no cookies neither.

As Google Suggestion comes from the queries which have a certain high search volume, I guess it’s the same for my name. I’ve made a deep study about it, and found that a lot of results come from webpages which have high occurrence of term “xitong” and “liu” since the ranking of webpages are based on a TF-IDF measure². To be specific, these webpages are talking about the notorious Chinese politician Chen Xitong³.

I’m always embarrassed when tell my name to unfamiliar people, since most of them will mention Chen. The pronunciation of Chen’s first name is the same as mine in Chinese, but the first character differs. For Chen’s, it’s 希同 while for mine it’s 熙同. The meaning of these two characters are totally different. Essentially, my name was given by my father without any relevance to Chen, since 熙 was a character widely used in person’s name in China, Japan and Korea.

Fortunately, the webpages in the first page of of the search results for my name are almost relevant to me. Thanks to the modern ranking algorithm, otherwise I’ll be messed up with Chen again. You can try it out: Xitong Liu on Google .

References

¹ Google Chrome Incognito mode, in which there is no initial cookies and all new cookies are deleted after you close all incognito windows that you’ve opened. It’s equivalent to “private browsing” in the terminology of other browsers.

² TF-IDF The tf–idf weight (term frequency–inverse document frequency) is a weight often used in information retrieval and text mining. This weight is a statistical measure used to evaluate how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a document’s relevance given a user query.

³ Chen Xitong (陳希同, born June 1930) was a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China and the Mayor of Beijing until he was removed from office on charges of corruption in 1995.

Daisy

2010-06-20T00:00:00-04:00

夏天盛开的花很多，我个人觉得，雏菊最好看，给人一种清新自然的感觉。粗略来看，雏菊就像小向日葵，而且花也是向阳而开。

Daisy

2010-06-19T00:00:00-04:00

雏菊曾出现在莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》中，女主人公奥菲莉娅（Ophelia）曾提及雏菊，寓意清白。

初夏盛开的雏菊，给人耳目一新的感觉。

Daisy

2010-06-19T00:00:00-04:00

雏菊曾出现在莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》中，女主人公奥菲莉娅（Ophelia）曾提及雏菊，寓意清白。

初夏盛开的雏菊，给人耳目一新的感觉。

Tortilla

2010-06-12T00:00:00-04:00

Ketchup

2010-06-12T00:00:00-04:00

会聊天的花儿

2010-06-12T00:00:00-04:00

Wild Duck

2010-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

US Park Police

2010-06-11T00:00:00-04:00

Xitong Liu

Xitong Liu in Google Suggestion

Xitong Liu in Google Suggestion

References

Daisy

Daisy

Daisy

郁金香？

Tortilla

Ketchup

会聊天的花儿

Wild Duck

US Park Police