The “Gods” and Google Alerts: Significant Quotation Marks

Many months ago (all right, more like a year ago), I signed up for Google Alerts on several topics so I could feature interesting things here without having to use Google News and/or Google Search every time I felt like making a post. Quite honestly, news breaks most often when one is not working on their blog, and the service promised to keep me up to date on current events.

I chose two keywords when I began, “hellenic polytheism” and “greek gods.” “Hellenic polytheism” seldom gives me anything, and frequently it pings me with materials from my blog or the Hellenic blogs I am subscribed to. “Greek gods,” on the other hand, began a long ordeal over meaning.

Sometimes, news search materials with “greek gods” return stories about fitness (“everyone can look like a Greek god on x diet”), Christianity/Islam (“the sin of polytheism and whoring after false gods made the Greeks and Romans do x, y, or z”), or information about Greek Gods yogurt. Mostly, though, I got things that had nothing to do with the Gods of Hellas, but everything to do with Greek Orthodoxy.

My ire rose steadily month after month as I tried fruitlessly to make Google Alerts give me what I wanted: discourse from people on news sites and blogs about the real Greek Gods—not yogurt, not Christianity, and certainly not hubristic comparisons between dieters/athletes and actual Greek Gods (hubristic mostly because I doubt most of the people on those diets have an understanding of arete or piety). Finally, I attempted one last thing: adding quotation marks around “gods” to see if Google would recognize that the quotation marks meant I didn’t want singulars.

So, yes. If you write “Greek ‘gods’” with “gods” in quotation marks, everything relevant comes up. While nice, this doesn’t feel right for several reasons:

• It means that Google, as opposed to knowing that I want the plural form of the word, thinks that singular and plurals are indistinguishable—or, in terms of my actual Alerts query, that the difference between God and Gods doesn’t matter. (Addendum: the most troubling thing, however, is that searches don’t differentiate “God’s” from “Gods” — this means that Google expects that people won’t know the difference between possessive and plural. I find this TERRIFYING.)
• Quotation marks make the Gods seem less genuine. As many know, quotation marks are commonly used in English to denote irony, falsehood, or imprecision. This is why, when we are sarcastically commenting on someone’s insincerity or doublespeak, we sometimes make quotation mark gestures with our hands. Since finding The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, I have tried to be very careful about my usage.

Both of these points have counterarguments: if I type “cats” into a search engine, I do want it to ping for the word “cat”; quotation marks, according to some, don’t matter as much now because usage has changed. (I disagree—just click on that link to the blog. It sends me into fits of hysterical laughter every time I read it.) These things matter in more subtle ways, like subliminal messages.

I am not about to stop using the tool because I dislike the message it gives me, though—listening in on the dialogue surrounding our Gods is more important. The change meant creating new filters and typing new keywords into my mail, but the content remained the same—or did it? To learn more, you’ll have to wait for Part Two.