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On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

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Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#81

Post by swe »

soared wrote: post #55
stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone." I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.

Love to see where you found that 99% figure

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#82

Post by Nadya »

dheera wrote: post #60
Nadya wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product? 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 t…

Interesting. But Yahoo has their own search engine. If Yahoo listed Yahoo Finance first, and Google listed Google Finance first, is there any legal issue? Both are working search engines and nobody is forcing you to use one over the other. I don't see a "true" monopoly situation. At least not a Comcastish monopoly in which other players are explicitly blocked from entering the market. For what it's worth, Bing and Ya…

>But Yahoo has their own search engine.

No they don't. They're a front-end for Bing search (at least until 2019 and in everywhere but Japan, which IIRC is a front-end for Google), but that's being nitpicky. :)

FWIW I've always had an issue with companies being punished for simply being better than alternatives. That includes Microsoft's advertising IE, even if IE at the time wasn't the best browser. People were free to use IE to download a better browser, so I never saw the issue with providing IE as a default. Linux was free, they were free to buy a computer, set it up themselves, and install Linux on it. The fact that they weren't choosing to do so should not result in Microsoft being punished.

However my beliefs and precedent set by previous law (even if it isn't legal precedent?) is still enough to have Google play it cautiously. Especially since there has been threat of such lawsuits if they were caught playing with their search results to advertise themselves and "kill off" competitors.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#83

Post by epimetheus »

soared wrote: post #55
stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone." I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.

Yeah, this works for me by just clicking "Search Instead for Amazone" - it even remembers it next time for me - I also was easily able to strip out Amazon results by adding -Amazon to the query.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#84

Post by [deleted] »

rsync wrote: post #63

Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this. There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless. The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier do…

[deleted]

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#85

Post by hyperpape »

vonklaus wrote: post #75
zeven7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of your points are wrong. Quoted strings always work for me (symbols are still stripped -- Google is a natural language search engine, not a code search engine), and there is a "not" operator, if I understand what you mean by that. From the article you linked: When you use a dash before a word or site, it excludes sites with that info from your results. This is useful for words with multiple meanings, li…

> I think most of your points are wrong. I believe s/he makes a good case. Google provides no concept of time. Best case conception of time seems to be either provided by the site directly, e.g. "article date" or something to this effect, or t0 = when google first learned about the page. Top anser for: "nodejs" + "2016" mongo api returns top hit: 2015, 2nd hit 2014. and that I can't give it context myself: Qouted str…

You can restrict results to the past day, week, month, year or custom range, using the search tools that appear underneath the search box.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#86

Post by vdnkh »

rsync wrote: post #63

Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this. There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless. The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier do…

I thought I was the only one going insane here. It's become legitimately difficult to discover blog posts/articles on programming topics that don't include the asinine "missing term" suffix. There are plenty of great blog posts/guides out there which DO include the term and are relevant, but are ignored for whatever reason. I end doing "xx yy mdn" with the search range to 1 year for most of my JS needs now. But god forbid you search for an object property (i.e. Object.assign) - you'll end up with 75% of results having "object", "assign", but not both.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#87

Post by CaptSpify »

soared wrote: post #55
stephaniepier wrote: post #10

This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assum…

Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone." I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.

For me, the frustration is that quotes usually fix it, but definitely not always. Also, they don't always tell you that they are auto-correcting. I agree that it's niche and, as he's the outlier, he should have to work around the system, but that's only true if the system is, for lack of a better term, "honest", which it isn't always.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#88

Post by [deleted] »

vonklaus wrote: post #64
Nadya wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you are given the ability to filter your results! Countless ways actually! Qualify your searches and modify them if needed. You were looking for information about goats . You should qualify "goats" with some form of "information about" statement. "goat" + "animal" makes the wikipedia page for goats the first search result. "goat" + "facts" gives you countless trivia pages, information, videos, etc Alternatively:…

Correct. However the problems (as I see them now) are 2fold: No concept of time. Best case conception of time seems to be either provided by the site, "article date" or something to this effect, or t0 = when google first learned about the page. So yes, "goat" + "animal" will return your results. Try: https://www.google.com/#q=%22nodejs%22+%2B+%222016%22++mongo... Top anser for: "nodejs" + "2016" mongo api returns top…

[deleted]

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#89

Post by nostrademons »

Google couldn't find what he was looking for because it doesn't exist on the web. Take a look at the search with a +retina term:

https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina

Or in verbatim mode:

https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1

His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually saying that Twitter's app has no retina support, and Deluge is mentioned elsewhere on the page, with nothing about retina support.

Re: On the growing, intentional uselessness of Google search results

#90

Post by epimetheus »

Nadya wrote: post #79
vonklaus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. However the problems (as I see them now) are 2fold: No concept of time. Best case conception of time seems to be either provided by the site, "article date" or something to this effect, or t0 = when google first learned about the page. So yes, "goat" + "animal" will return your results. Try: https://www.google.com/#q=%22nodejs%22+%2B+%222016%22++mongo... Top anser for: "nodejs" + "2016" mongo api returns top…

You can set a time range under "Search Tools". See here: http://i.imgur.com/n5BNkei.png As for filtering by backend technology - I'm not sure that would always be feasible. While it may be possible to filter default Wordpress sites, I'm not so sure about sites whom backbone architecture may not be known or publicly available. E: As for your computer issue, try searching for "problem/error name" + "solved" rather than…

I was going to suggest daterange, but it didn't work for me (haven't used it in awhile), however, I think this tool replaced it, you can even set custom ranges with that.
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