A recent Google search for the Walmart being built 2 miles away from me led me nowhere. Google listed 2 pages of job sites listing open positions at this wal-mart. I almost gave up my search, but decided to search twitter and in doing so I found what I was looking for!
Jan. 15th I was curious if the walmart was going to be a supercenter so I searched, "fallston md walmart," & "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter." As you can see either result does not show the most relevant and recent info about my query, rather it's littered by prominent job sites. Though on a search for "will fallston md walmart be a supercenter," i see the six result to be http://www.belairnewsandviews.com/2011/01/job-ads-out-this-w..., yet that information to me was weak;. it deduces from all the job listings that yes this will be a Super Walmart. Since I found the results/info lacking I immediately went to Twitter and found an even more detailed article(http://belair.patch.com/articles/fallston-walmart-may-open-b...) that had pictures that I think should have appeared in one of my queries. As you see that article was published Jan. 14th and Google did not point me to the most recent/up to date info rather it favored prominent job sites' listings, yet Twitter did.
Pardon, if this seems nitpicky, but just wanted to share one of my recent experiences where Google failed me(i have another example too but search was personal), while Twitter did not.
This is interesting. Part of the problem is answering questions when there's not much content on the web. I think a lot of the job sites showed up because Walmart is hiring for that location in preparation for opening.
I'm just now testing this query, but when I did [fallston md walmart], there is a really comprehensive article at http://www.exploreharford.com/news/3074/work-start-fallston-... that shows up at #5. That article mentions that "The new road will lead into a 147,465-square-foot Walmart, which has been planned with a possible 57,628-square-foot expansion" Then I did the search [walmart supercenter size square feet]. The #1 and #2 results are both pretty good, e.g. the page at http://walmartstores.com/aboutus/7606.aspx says that an average store is 108K square feet, and supercenters average 185K square feet.
As a human, I can deduce that 147K square feet (with 57K square feet of potential expansion) implies that it will probably be a supercenter, but it's practically impossible for a search engine to figure out this sort of multi-step computation right now. My guess is that in a couple months when the store opens up, this information will be more findable on the web--for example, somewhere on Walmart's web site. But for now, this is a really hard search because there's just not much info on the web.
I appreciate you sharing this search. I think it's a pretty fair illustration of how peoples' expectations of Google have grown exponentially over the years. :)
