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Giving up on Google

robsheldon.com

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Re: Giving up on Google

#71

Post by jacquesm »

yellowbkpk wrote: post #54
danilocampos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.

I wonder if part of Google's speed increases involve dropping some of the more complex keywords while creating the index so that the search space is smaller.

Not that I can detect.

For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com.

Extra points if you know what it stands for :)

Re: Giving up on Google

#72

Post by thaumaturgy »

pyre wrote: post #50
thaumaturgy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the heads-up. Actually it is designed to gracefully fall back without JavaScript, but there appears to be a display bug I wasn't aware of. I'll fix it soon but right now I have a server down. (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) edit: fixed.

> (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you > noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) I can't quite form words around the feeling, but this feels like a very backwards statement to me.

It's relatively easy these days to make sites that use JS in a smart way to dynamically load content. In the case of this personal site, if JS is on, then all the links do is request a "stripped-down" version of only the content of each post, and then swap that into the main content area. There are no http requests then for the images, background, css, and so on, which is nice for the server.

That's all well and good, but then I have to go back and make that also all work for noscript users. So, for example, I can't just have a list of items on the left, and then on page load, have JavaScript just "click" the top item in the list. Instead, I have to put in extra effort to get the backend to handle the default home page, and so on.

On this site, that wasn't really that hard. On more complex sites, it can be very hard.

...and I'm one of the "silly" web developers, that actually tries to work with the .5% or so of people that have JS turned off. With jQuery and everything else out there, most web developers don't seem to bother.

Re: Giving up on Google

#73

Post by jacquesm »

EricBurnett wrote: post #55
danilocampos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search history is one of Google's creepier features – I disabled it awhile ago. Not that I suspect it helps anything, but at least if someone finds my computer or something, that data isn't two clicks away.

FYI, search history is one of the parts of the account you have to put your password in again to view. So it should be safe from prying eyes.

Prying eyes on your side of the connection you mean.

Re: Giving up on Google

#74

Post by thaumaturgy »

patrickaljord wrote: post #67
thaumaturgy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

> Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again. You're spoiled then.

"It could be worse" is always a valid rebuttal to any complaint.

But it doesn't actually move the conversation forward at all.

Re: Giving up on Google

#75

Post by RexRollman »

danilocampos wrote: post #51
dasil003 wrote: post #49

I don't understand the Gmail complaint at all . Sure it has its weaknesses such as the policy to not spend the resources stemming emails causing search to suck, but Gmail pretty much defined the usable webmail interface for power users. The interface on my webmail software feels like a mail client should -- easy navigation, threaded conversations, multiple window panes, and it's fast. Google on the other hand took ye…

I think the big deal there is yeah, Gmail works but it doesn't $50 a year work.

Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.

Re: Giving up on Google

#76

Post by dRother »

I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'.

Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.

As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.

Re: Giving up on Google

#77

Post by studer »

arohner wrote: post #34
danilocampos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, they have that already. If you wrap a word/phrase with quotes, they'll not screw around with their fancy word clustering.

Not really. I've had this break for me all the time when searching for programming terms. Proof: Google for "what we have here is failure to communicate" http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... The first hit is the wiki article on the quote (good), but the exact search string is not present on the page.

Click "cached", and you get the explanation:

"These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: what we have here is failure to communicate"

Re: Giving up on Google

#78

Post by dRother »

danilocampos wrote: post #15

I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half. At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with that." And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my input as I've provided it. I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.

I, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.

Re: Giving up on Google

#79

Post by petercooper »

jacquesm wrote: post #61
danilocampos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.

Yes, please. The image search has been a pet peeve of mine, especially because of the way the results are provided to the end users. It seems they do everything they can to stop people from visiting actual websites through the image search. Instant search was fun for about 30 seconds. Then it's back to work and then it is rather annoying. At least you can disable it (just to the right of the search bar there is a lit…

2008 sounds just about right, they can market it as 'google classic' for all I care.

It makes me wonder if, perhaps, Google2010 is just Google's New Coke ;-)

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