Google search results seem to have hit the Pineapple Express a little too hard. If you do a quick Google search for Seth Rogan’s and James Franco’s stoner classic “Pineapple Express,” you’ll see a 6.9/10 rating from IMDb, a 68 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and an 8/10 rating on Leafly.
Notice anything odd about that last one? Leafly doesn’t rate movies, it rates marijuana strains. So no matter what the folks over at Leafly think about the movie, that 8/10 rating truly belongs to the sativa and indica hybrid Pineapple Express, not the movie “Pineapple Express.”
For every search, the Google algorithm pulls in what it believes to be relevant information and presents that information in a sidebar to the search results. That sidebar is called a Knowledge Graph, Leafly content strategist David Karalis explains on Leafly.
“Google’s goal here is to move to a ‘semantic search’ model, which seeks to better understand the intent and contextual meaning behind the overarching topic of someone’s search. The search giant process over 40,000 search queries per second, so they have a lot of data to draw from when tying together different topics and subtopics,” Karalis said. “However, this still doesn’t answer the question of why Leafly strain reviews are being pulled into the ‘Pineapple Express’ movie Knowledge Graph.”
We tested out a few searches ourselves and also came across a 5/5 rating from Wikileaf, another marijuana rating site. That’s a ranking Saul would appreciate, just judging by his own evaluation of the strain as so good that “it’s almost a shame to smoke it. It’s like killing a unicorn…with, like, a bomb.”
