[tz] Irish Standard Time vs Irish Summer Time

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Mon Dec 11 07:33:16 UTC 2017


Brian Inglis wrote:
> The URL "+" appears as " " in the search box and vice-versa " " in the search
> box appears as "+" in the URL.

With that in mind I currently see this at UCLA:

73 "Irish Summer Time" IST
44 "Irish Standard Time" IST
21 "Irish Summer Time" IST site:ie
31 "Irish Standard time" IST site:ie

(Note that these numbers differ from yesterday; also, I've now done this so 
often that Google is starting to throttle my searches, which is slowing me down.)

Superficially looking at these numbers, it appears that IST is more likely to 
mean "Irish Summer Time" outside Ireland and "Irish Standard Time" within 
Ireland. But when I look at the actual matches I see the pattern I noticed 
before: many of the hits for the first query are false matches. For its first 5 
hits from unique sites, for example:

std https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/ist-ireland
std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ireland
std https://www.worldtimeserver.com/time-zones/ist-3/
sum https://www.horlogeparlante.com/time-zone-IST.html
sum https://www.sitesworld.com/time/ist-(irish)-to-ist.html

whereas when I do the same for the second query, I see:

std https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/ist-ireland
std http://timebie.com/timezone/irishindia.php
std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Ireland
std https://www.worldtimeserver.com/time-zones/ist-3/
std https://www.worlddata.info/timezones/ist-irish-standard-time.php

(Here "std" means the web page says "Irish Standard Time", whereas "sum" means 
it says "Irish Summer Time".)

In other words, the query for "Irish Summer Time" has many hits that say "Irish 
Standard Time", whereas the query for "Irish Standard Time" is hitting just 
"Irish Standard Time" pages. So I'm still inclined to think that "Irish Standard 
Time" is significantly more popular in practice.


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