41–50 of 134 posts
Try Google Search without a Google account or any Google cookies. It may be more neutral without "search personalization".
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…
This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results I need, so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model for the exact reason you gave as a defense.
edit: If disagreement could be verbalized it would be super helpful to me. I have been thinking about this issue a lot, and often I see people say the same thing as me:
* single website controls almost 100% of english language results
* limiting of images/video from results
* incorrect/wrong results
* limited respect for boolean and quotation operators
* high ranking sites are not authoritative, e.g. w3schools, wordpress automated blogs.
* no way to filter at all
But then down vote my conclusion:
> searches could be filtered and parameters set by user.
Really would be useful to understand my logic error, or if I have missed something.
I've long given up on Google outside of the anglosphere. I travel a lot. Location services are enabled on my phone and laptop yet Google still wants to serve up results from the US. I've had to be very careful with how I use Maps since the name of a dutch city or street just might share the same name as some bar in middle America. I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some results take…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newcomers might be better off approaching the challenge in a totally different way.
I remember DDG did side-by-side comparisons, but did they ever just query Google themselves and then do their own stuff on top? Anyway I'm not sure Google can be beaten at all by any particular newcomer, instead they might suffer death by a thousand cuts as more niche engines like Shodan show up and bring in context-specific searches that are orders of magnitude better than Google's more complicated all-web-they-appr…
>OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it!
That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to what he's looking for. What am I missing? He's saying the first results are worse, but they are better results. They return the actual app he's looking for, where he could presumably find info on retina support, not some completely different app's lack of retina. All of the links in the second screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for.
There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not a…
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.c…
Because that's how lawsuits happen. They let the search engine run itself. If more people are using Yahoo Finance over Google Finance, the search results will reflect that.
I genuinely believe they aren't dumb enough to open themselves up to monopolistic behavior lawsuits. The Microsoft lawsuits weren't that long ago and I'm sure Google is wary enough to make some attempt at avoiding a repeat.
I have little reason to suspect Google purposefully toys with their search results to promote their own products. Given the quality of their products - I'm more inclined to believe that when a Google product is the first result for a name/search, it's probably because people actually use/enjoy that product.
As an example, Google Maps vs other "Maps". While Google is certainly trying to join the ranks, I find other "Maps" to be entirely unusable with terrible UI and am not surprised in the slightest when Google Maps is the first result when looking for directions.
It could also be you use Yahoo Finance more often and thus personalized results had it listed first. Google Finance ranks 4th on the page for me for that search result.
Another that I've more recently noticed is conversions on mobile. I went from being able to type any approximation of "ounces" "to/in/-" "pounds" and getting a number right away to having to click on one of the results to get the number. It seems like backward from Google's normal MO so I don't really understand why they'd do it but I definitely have consistently had problems with that especially more recently.
Yeah this bites me nearly every day. I can only assume that they have some data that this helps 60%-80% of their users in some way, and they are optimizing for the common case rather than the uncommon case. Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as a company or its policies.
I don't understand this article, particularly this footnote: >OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it! That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to…