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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

Why? Because it's a common word and difficult to google? I refer you to Java, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Forth, and Lisp.

All of which were invented before search engines were of much importance.

I googled a few of those (including go and swift) and the first result was always about the programming language. I would expect that most people googling "go" would actually like to know about the game (and same for ruby-the stone, python-the snake, and so on).

I always assumed that google took my past searches and history into account, that a normal person would get a python.

Beware that Google is tailoring the results to what it knows about you. If I Google "swift" from a normal window, Apple's main Swift page is the first hit. If I do it from an incognito window, the first hit is the bank transfer provider.

Of course, most people who are looking for the programming language will probably be known to Google to be interested in that, so the result isn't necessarily invalid, but neither is it universal.

did you google those keyword "anonymously"? because it's pretty well known that the same google search does not give the same result regardlessly from the user that is searching it.

cfr. http://dontbubble.us/ as a note, I don't agree with "don't bubble us". Or better I agree but I find the bubble extremely convenient most of the times; when not I do use duckduckgo :)

I just googled "go" in an incognito window and got 10 results referring to "Goiás", a brazilian political division.

But that's not exactly the problem. The problem comes up when you're searching for more specific things. Try, for example "go reduce function" (just came up with this example now, I'm sure my argument will be better if you search for an actually real-world edge case) and you'll probably get Go results, but I also get PHP, Javascript and Python results.

If, instead, I searched for any of these languages + "reduce function" I would only get relevant results.

Swift is even worse.

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