Notices tagged with googlesearch

Discussed Venn diagrams with a couple of friends this morning, especially in the context of illustrating the utility of including all 3 or 4 of a specific set of design principles when creating certain kinds of things, and learned about the difference between Venn diagrams and Euler diagrams.

In short:
* a Venn diagram shows ALL possible relationships between different sets
* an Euler diagram shows only some relationships between different sets, typically focused on conveying relevant or the more important relationships

If you want to dive into their history and why these differences matter, bookmark (or open new tab) this Scientific American article to rabbithole later:
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/venn-diagrams-history-and-popularity-outside-of-math-explained/

In pop culture and media, nearly any diagram of overlapping circles with labeled regions is (errantly) referred to as a “Venn diagram”.

This is imprecise at best, outright incorrect in many cases, especially diagrams of four circles.

A classic example is the “Ikigai” diagram:

Many (examples below) call this a Venn diagram. It is not a Venn diagram. It is an Euler diagram.

The Ikigai diagram fails to express two specific relationships between different sets, the two that contain opposing side circles but neither of the other two. The missing Ikigai sets relationships in particular:
1. only “you are good at” AND “the world needs” (with neither of the other two)
2. only “you love” AND “you can be paid for” (again with neither of the other two)

If you Google web search for "examples of four circle venn diagrams", Gemini gets this wrong:

And so do the majority of articles that Google shows in top results (which I’m not helping by linking here, but hey it’s Google’s job to fix its search quality, not mine. I was able to use Internet Archive links for two of them at least.)
* https://web.archive.org/web/20260823204717/https://boardmix.com/knowledge/4-circle-venn-diagrams/
* https://miro.com/templates/4-circle-venn-diagram/ (Miro’s own top template there is wrong, though others have contributed proper 4 set Venn diagrams)
* https://web.archive.org/web/20260823205434/https://www.istockphoto.com/illustrations/venn-4-circles-diagram
* https://www.educationworld.com/tools_templates/EW_venndiagram_4

This has interesting implications for expertise and trust.

Clearly by this one example search result, we cannot trust the expertise of "design tool" websites (boardmix, miro), nor stock photo websites.

Nor can we trust educationworld as a place to be educated.

Nor can we trust Google Search (or Google Gemini) to surface expertise above popular misconceptions.

Perhaps a good example of when to use Wikipedia search instead of Google (or other generic) web search.

Personally I generalize this example to “all proper nouns”, that is:

* Wikipedia search proper nouns instead of Google or other general web searching.

You can make this more convenient by setting up “w” as a search shortcut for Wikipedia: https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox

For reference / more reading on Venn diagrams and Euler diagrams:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_diagram

#Venn #diagram #diagrams #VennDiagram #VennDiagrams #EulerDiagram #math #maths #sets #setTheory #relationships #Ikigai #fourCircles #fourCirclesVenn #fourCirclesVennDiagram #misconception #popMisconception #Google #GoogleSearch #GoogleWebSearch #webSearch #search #Gemini #GoogleGemini #GeminiWrong #expertise #trust #webTrust #Wikipedia
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

Update on Bing use-case: quickly view a Gregorian calendar month display with new features and without Copilot noise.

In 2024, I wrote about a use-case for Bing where it vastly outshines all other search engines. https://tantek.com/2024/287/t3/bing-use-case-calendar-month

Since then, Bing has added “Copilot” LLM generated results to the top of search results by default, and unfortunately they add zero value to calendar month searches and displays. Worse, Copilot’s “summary” can often be long enough to push the actual calendar month display “below the fold” as it were.

Solution: add " -ai" to your query.

E.g. assuming you’ve setup Firefox search shortcuts as I recommended (https://tantek.com/2024/287/t2/setup-search-shortcuts-firefox)

Type this into your Firefox address bar:

b 2026 sep -ai

or directly go to https://bing.com/ and enter: 2026 sep -ai

and press return. You should see a days and weeks grid display for September 2026, with the current day of the month (the 9th as I’m writing this) selected in the displayed month.

Note the new calendar month display features since I last blogged this in 2024:
* Day 252 — day of the year! September 9th of 2026 is the 252nd day of 2026.
* Week 37 — Sept 9th is also on the 37th week of 2026
* 31 days later — Sept 9th is 31 days from today (August 9th).
* < [ Sep v ] > – little anglebracket arrows on either side of the month button/dropdown to one-click nav to the prev/next month
* [ Start Day v ] — a new “Start Day” drop down button to change which day of the week to display as the start of the week

Amazing that despite already being far better than any other search engine for year month queries, Bing has *improved* its calendar month display search results, while Duckduckgo, Google, Yahoo are just as useless (yes I checked) as they were two years ago (I also tried Ecosia and it was no better). I am hashtagging them all to see if anyone at those other search engines notices and gets around to implementing a similar calendar month display.

#search #webSearch #SearchShortcut #Microsoft #Bing #MicrosoftBing #BingSearch #BingTip #searchTip #calendar #month
#CoPilot #NoCoPilot #NoAI #NoGenAI #NoLLM #Firefox #DuckDuckGo #Google #GoogleSearch #Yahoo #YahooSearch #Ecosia.

#Blaugust #Blaugust2026

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Notices tagged with googlesearch