Tiny Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini

Search users "are incredibly lazy." They type in one word or "a few words at most, then expect the engine to bring back perfect results." (p. 24). Use a thesaurus and your imagination to investigate the different keywords that people might use to search for the same thing. Use google trends to compare synonyms and see what synonym is the most popular. Report your results. Then search for those keywords yourself in google and see which keyword is most effective at finding relevant results (or are they all the same?).

I compared four synonyms: bikini, swimsuit, bathing suit, and swimwear
Referring to the results below, the most popular of these four search keywords is "bikini."

The keyword "bikini" is significantly higher than any of the other keywords, while "bathing suit" in blue is the lowest by far. "Bikini" has generally decreased from 2004 to 2009, but has never failed to be the top keyword. In addition, gradual upswings in "bikini" tend to happen every year in summer months, which is when the respective clothing item is usually worn. There are also some spikes around December, which may be due to increased traveling. "Swimsuit" and "swimwear" have similar rates, with almost coinciding lines, save a spike in "swimsuit" around February in each year depicted.

Search: "bikini"
The search results were not particular relevant in finding bikinis. Out of the ten website results on the first page, only three were dedicated to selling bikinis. The sites that sell bikinis tended to be really scandalous and racy styles. The other sites included bikini videos, weekly bikini models pictures, bikini on wikipedia, Flickr: "bikini," Bikini Atoll (which apparently is a site for nuclear tests), and an article about a cheap bikini. Overall, these are not the results I was expecting.

Search: "swimsuit"
With "swimsuit," I received more fruitful results, however two of the websites listed were exclusively targeted to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, one the actual website and the other an amazon.com listing. Along with these websites were links to Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition videos. There was a "Victoria's Secret Swim" result in the sponsored links part of the page, which is relevant, along with several other sites to purchase swimsuits. Another website was all about the Miss America Swimsuit Competition video. It could be that people who search "swimsuit" want information about the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition. However, I was looking for actual swimsuits, and although this search is better than "bikini," it still turned up with undesirable options.

Search: "bathing suit"
In the sponsored links section, the websites for Macy's, Victoria's Secret, and JCPenney were the results. As for the non-sponsored link section, this keyword search was the best in regards to actual bathing suits. There are two YouTube videos about Tyra Banks, a history of the bathing suit, and a link for an amazon listing for a Barbie bathing suit. Technically, they are all relevant, but if you are only looking at results of bathing suits, there are only three links out of ten that do not have relevant results.

Search: "swimwear"
Although "bathing suit" had the best results thusfar, "swimwear" takes the cake with all ten results on the first page being links to look at/purchase swimwear, and also three sponsored links that are relevant as well. Overall, this search returned the most relevant and was the most effective in finding the best results.

Within the Bartelle reading, he indicates that, "...search engines are still working on the problem of how to best match searches for 'soda' and searches for 'pop,' 'tennis shoes' with 'sneakers,' or 'feline' with 'cat'" (24). All of these pairs of words essentially mean the same thing, but the results returned are not the same. Similarly, that is why the four words I chose to represent the same thing did not have the same results when using Google. Some search engine results are alike because some of the comparative results for my searches were the same, but for "bikini," the results were drastically different from the rest (and "bikini" has the most common search trend on Google). Simply stated, many people search these different words for various reasons. It just may be that people are looking for Sports Illustrated when they search "swimsuit."