That's very odd. I just typed "Soviet Ruble" into Google and every single result on the first page is about the Soviet, not modern Russian, currency[*]. This includes the box of images on the right-hand side, all of which depict USSR money.
Not really sure what to make of this.
[*] With the arguable exception of an Encyclopedia Britannica article on "ruble", which covers USSR, Soviet Union and Belarus currencies at the same time: ruble, the monetary unit of Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Belarus (spelled rubel)...
I believe Google's algorithm will confound such experiments because it tailors search results according to user history. Which may mean that some portion of the HN crowd could see worse than average performance if they are more likely to clear cookies and/or search without a login.
I hate that they do this. Sometimes I just want neutral results. Nothing scoped to my location, to my search history or preferences I don’t even know of myself.
Especially when researching a controversial topic, and try to get new data.
I think you're right: some sort of personalisation could well be contributing to the discrepancy.
P.S. Driven by curiosity, I repeated my experiment from an incognito window and it yielded the same results. This time I looked at the results beyond page one, and at least the first few pages of results are 100% relevant.
Not really sure what to make of this.
[*] With the arguable exception of an Encyclopedia Britannica article on "ruble", which covers USSR, Soviet Union and Belarus currencies at the same time: ruble, the monetary unit of Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Belarus (spelled rubel)...