Today I have been one of the dumbasses who end up typing the URL of a web page in the Google search box and hitting ENTER without thinking.

I was trying to open up Cognitive Match‘s web page @ www.cognitivematch.com — and through the above mistake I got Google to search instead for www.cognitivematch.com. Oh well, I guess I didn’t have enough coffee in me, Google probably figured that out (based on the unique user tracking cookie I have in my browser no doubt, geo-IP targetting, time of day and all the other factors) so kindly offered me the first result to be Cognitive Match, as to be expected; it even offered me a link to our company LinkedIn page (nice!):

It has to be said it was only at this point I have realised the mistake 🙂 So as I was just about to click on our web page, curiosity got the better of me and I thought I’d scroll to the bottom to see what else has the big G found about Cognitive Match. And here’s a gem of Google occasional fuck-up — right at the bottom, where it gets to “Pages similar to www.cognitivematch.com“:

I had to scan the results again: so we got Dawn Capital (that makes sense, it’s been allover the press they were the investors behind us all the way through), Alex Kelleher, our CEO, and his blog, we have then at the bottom a post on TechCrunch about us getting our Series A investment from Dawn Capital, but the interesting bit is the 3rd page “similar” to www.cognitivematch.com : Pentaho!!! WTF???

I mean back in prehistoric times, when dinosaurs roamed still the Earth and we were trialling out various analytics platforms, we have evaluated Pentaho — going past the commercial blur we were given, we figured out pretty quick this would NOT scale out in an online environment with TB of information being built every week. So we ditched the thing — it never went anywhere!

So I set off to investigate this more! And here’s the culprit: http://www.pentaho.com/customers/ — this page here still (wrongly!) claims that Cognitive Match is one of their customers! We are nowadays Hadoop-based, we’re working with the likes of BitYota, we have our in-house data mining team and you are still hanging on to the Cognitive Match brand???? Based on that alone I’d be tempted at this stage to think that maybe most of the other Pentaho “customers” are in the same situation as us? I mean, how many of those customers there do still use Pentaho? Guys, come on, you’re not doing yourselves any favours!

And even more, you cause Google to fuck up their results 🙂