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Google (or other search engines) are pretty magical to find information, by inferring what you probably meant to ask.

In some cases though, the very high popularity of one meaning of a particular search term kinda occults everything around it.

A basic search for U2 will probably return tons of stuff around the band, rather than the airplane (easily worked around by adding airplane or -band -music).

However, say you try to find out something about Amazon Reviews however and you will be swamped with results about this or that book, and there is no easy way to look for throw them all away and concentrate on Amazon's handling of that subject.

Doesn't happen too often, but when something like that does, it's both pretty frustrating and quite hard to explain. So, in a world where Googling means searching online for info, how do we indicate cases where it's not likely to work, but because of a forest and trees phenomenon, rather than the subject being hidden/secret/unknown.

Another example, (I am a techy), is a program that I sometimes use called runit. Try googling up runit and you get all sorts of technical results about running program x or y, because runit is such a generic term, even without a separating space.

Occulting seems like a possibility, but its meaning in this context is not sufficiently clear on its own without needing extra explanations.

I tried to Google Amazon Reviews and couldn't filter out all complaints about this or that book. I just wanted to find out if Amazon still displays reviews, not hear about people paying for fake reviews. This is another case of __________.

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  • This another case of the problems you run into when you search for an unpopular usage with a tool that gives popularity-based results. Not a single word, though.
    – Davo
    Dec 28, 2017 at 20:31
  • This is another case of [essential] information drowned/buried in the mass.
    – Graffito
    Dec 28, 2017 at 21:49

3 Answers 3

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A 2013 article on the BBC site discusses whether ungoogleable is a word. Quoting it :

The idea that something can't be found online is strange enough to have spawned its own adjective.
The word "ungoogleable" is in the headlines after a dispute between the search engine giant and Sweden's language watchdog.
The Language Council of Sweden wanted to include "ungoogleable" - or "ogooglebar" - in its annual list of new Swedish words. But it defined the term as something that cannot be found with any search engine. [...]

Collins have this term marked Approval Status: Pending Investigation

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    Seems almost too easy to use Google as the root here, but it's still the closest match to my intentions.
    – Italian Philosophers 4 Monica
    Dec 30, 2017 at 21:30
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I've always settled for "... is hard to Google for". There are many idiomatic ways to describe the difficulties, and they depend on the causes (e.g. sometimes a search term is too common in unrelated fields, or is just a common word, period).

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This is an example of the wheat vs chaff problem (also cited here)—where the amount of material is so huge that the search engine can't process it in a manner that will allow it to separate the valuable items (wheat) from the background noise (chaff).

To complete your sample sentence:

I tried to Google Amazon Reviews and couldn't filter out all complaints about this or that book. I just wanted to find out if Amazon still displays reviews, not hear about people paying for fake reviews. This is another case of not being able to find the wheat for all the chaff.

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