Goo Smart by Half

I typed “postgis” into Google this evening, and in addition to the exquisitely organized first entry there were two ads, one relevant (EnterpriseDB, the Postgres company) and one seemingly utterly random, for an English language school.

Has the Google algorithm made a mistake? How is this relevant? Well, the language school is in Victoria, BC, birth-place of PostGIS, but it gets better than that.

Here’s a picture of their sign, which I walked past every morning for almost five years, since the school shares a building (1207 Douglas Street) with Refractions Research, birth-company of PostGIS.

But wait, there’s more! The name of the school is “GEOS Language Academy”, and the GEOS spatial library was also created in Victoria, specifically to bring spatial predicate algorithms to PostGIS!

Poor Google algorithm, you never stood a chance.