Google’s search engine is famous for its results and the secrecy surrounding the search algorithms. I appreciate that the results it lists are actually related to what I typed in. That is not always the case.

Take my local library’s web site. When I enter “Jon Winokur” and select the “author” category (looking for Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights), the first two results listed are for James Garner. Then it includes nine entries for Jon Winokur, none of which are the book I want.

When I search for “Ruth Hayden,” the author of Mrs. Delaney: Her Life and Her Flowers, one result is returned: Sue Grafton’s Writing mysteries : a handbook by the Mystery Writers of America.

I have no idea how they arrive at these “matches.”

It’s not just books where I have search problems — fabric can be just as elusive. I had a jellyroll of Moda’s Summer Breeze II fabric and decided that I wanted yardage of one of those fabrics. I went to my usual super-duper online fabric web site. And when I searched on “Moda Summer Breeze II” (the specific name of the fabric line), I got 2,370 matches with the overwhelming majority of the results having nothing to do with that line of fabric. I wasn’t about to page through 2,370 line items, some of which weren’t even fabric.

So, thank you Google. When I search for Georges Seurat, I get “about 181,000” results and at least the ones on the first page are all related to George Seurat.