You’re A Very Funny Suburb, Mr. Chase

by: George Bounacos Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

When he was struggling to overcome a country beseiged by Vietnam, a Vice President who had resigned over financial issues, a President who had resigned over multiple issues and recent memory of lines for gasoline, Gerald Ford was regularly lampooned by a comedian in his early 30s. The comedian was on this new show called Saturday Night Live and spent a year being its diva star until John Belush, Gilda Radner and Bill(y) Murray knocked him out of the way.

Chevy Chase didn’t choose his name. Apparently, Cornelius Chase was called Chevy by a relative. That didn’t stop then-President Ford from quipping that Chase was “a very funny suburb”. But with convergence among names and algorithims attempting to link concepts, a typical web surfer may quickly get confused. One of Google’s response was interest-based advertising, part of the search engine’s attempt to determine whether searchers were looking for Rice University or rice pilaf as Sara likes to say.

That doesn’t stop search engines when they’re reporting the news and trying to decide if Chevy Chase is a man, a suburb or a bank. Bing’s new XRank feature (which is prettier Google Trends so far) hits the wall on that very question today.