Do you have a Little Willy? Ask.com can tell you.

When it comes to music my taste is pretty eclectic. One musical style I have become fond of over recent years is acoustic music particularly some types of folk, blues, etc… An example is Little Willies and while they have a famous lead singer in Norah Jones (the multiple grammy award winner) the general public is not overly aware of them. I did a search on Little Willies today looking for some online examples of their music to share with a co-worker. I decided to try Ask.com who has been making a lot of noise about how “helpful” their search results offering images, songs, maps, and more tied to the search query of the user.

When the serp came up I found just what Ask.com had told me I would. A variety of suggestions for how to narrow my search, expand my search and some related names. Up in the right hand corner I also found images related to the keywords “little willies” and that’s what caught my eye. Take a look:

Finally! Men and women have a non-subjective “little willy measurement” thanks to Ask.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with Ask.com’s layout. I like that they help me track down the information I’m looking for when I’m not always sure how to phrase the query, or in this case, what it looks like. However, this is a great example of the fact that search engines don’t always get it right. Sometimes they miss the mark because they trust a computer algorithm too much and sometimes because they place too much trust in humans. Out “little willy quandry” is an example of the latter. Someone decided to tag their sculpture picture as “little willy” and it got picked up by Ask as a “related image”. While it wasn’t particularly helpful to me in this case at least it offered a little bit of comic relief.