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As far as I can tell Google is basically giving up on the search business. About a month ago I reported a couple spam sites that were in the top ten results for a fairly popular search phrase. Over a month later they're still there. These are sites that are literally just a list of keywords with no actual content of value on the site, and Google does nothing even though they come up at the top of the results for a ph…
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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... The first hit is the wiki article on the quote (good), but the exact search string is not present on the page.
I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. So, we notice every spam entry. I work in search and I can't recollect a time EVER having been frustrated with what Google gave me - and having to go to another engine. And I live, eat, & breathe the thing. I understand…
I think part of the problem is that for many people google is the internet. Even for me (pretty technically minded) if a few google searches doesn't find what I'm looking for it isn't on the internet, or might as well not be. I don't think I've even tried turning to another search engine in several years.
So Google has power search operators and we introduce new tools like the left-hand side searching tools, but we also have to try to be accessible for the folks that aren't that tech-savvy.
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>> I really think this is a case of confirmation bias. We see Google approaching this dominating mass that's impossible to stop, so we begin looking for ways to tear down big brother and look for holes. I think that this is a case where we were comparing Google to what existing before (Yahoo, etc), and thought "this is great". Now we compare Google only to what we think it 'should' be.
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.
When I joined Google in 2000, one thing I did was run a bunch of searches and save the results. When I went back and looked at the data, Google2000 can't compare to Google2010. Google2000 still had lots of spam--it was much, much better than Altavista or other competitors at the time, but the results weren't nearly as good as they are now. I keep meaning to do a blog post and show some examples.
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 use Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin and am pretty happy with that stack (although I've currently got a very annoying Roundcube problem, so ...).
I think Gmail does hit a sweet spot for most power emailers. It took months for me to switch from my previous custom mutt + .procmail setup to Gmail. Do I still miss procmail sometimes? Sure. But overall, I save a ton of time using Gmail instead of rolling my own email solution.
Just last Friday, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duck Duck Go is the only search engine (of those I tried) that shows me a hex color when I search it, e.g. http://duckduckgo.com/?q=%23004499 And not long before, I searched for my oldest still-surviving site (on Angelfire). I discovered that while Google returned 20 garbage sites, they didn’t include mine; my site was the only one DDG returned.
I've created a subscribed links to mimic the UNIX cal command, for example: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/add-calendar-shortcut-to-googl...
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They should add some kind of "I mean this word and only this word" symbol. Maybe backslash, since it's sort of like you're escaping the word. So in your case, you'd change "NSTableView" to "\NSTableView" and it would work.
In fairness, they have that already. If you wrap a word/phrase with quotes, they'll not screw around with their fancy word clustering.
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…
A lot has changed since 2004. Yahoo for example has 3 pane viewing, tabbed email and chat, you can scroll through and see every email in your Inbox ever received without having to click any links. It feels pretty much like a desktop application, actually...
- [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About 1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web has very little content that matches that query in any way. That's why the lower-quality and foreign results show up: we're scraping the bottom of the barrel of the web to find any results at all, and there's not many pages that have that those words. If you go to avaya.com and search for [103r], they don't find any results either. It's hard for Google to return useful Avaya results when avaya.com doesn't have that word anywhere on the site. :)
- You were looking for specs on a Gateway mt6840 motherboard, specifically the socket. Instead of trying to solve that in one query, I'd go for doing it in two steps. I did the query [site:gateway.com mt6840] to see if there was any authoritative result, and the #1 result was http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014... which has specs for that motherboard, but not the socket. But that spec sheet mentions that the motherboard uses a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T2450. So then I searched for [T2450 socket] and got a Wikipedia page that says the T2450 uses Socket M. Just to be safe, searching for [MT6840 "socket m"], which returns a page on computing.net that's a forum with some ads, but the page mentions "945GM-based laptops support Socket M Core 2 Duo CPUs." The Gateway spec sheet says the MT6840 uses a 945GM chipset, so Socket M seems like a safe bet.
- The last search was about an OpenSolaris machine that wouldn't boot and that said "Error 16" instead. The complaint was that the results were stale/old. I did the search [opensolaris boot "error 16"]. Then over on the left-hand side, click "Show search tools" and click "Past year" to get results from the past year. The #1 result shows a long discussion about debugging this (which implies it's not a trivial issue). The #2 result is a discussion that points into opensolaris.org, which then points to this bug: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 . My point on this query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year).
We do try to provide tools (e.g. estimated number of results, or the ability to restrict results by date) to help find the answers--or to find out if there aren't good answers on the web.
And in some cases like your #2 search, we could do a better job of synthesizing information. If page A says that a motherboard uses this chip/chipset and page B says that this chip/chipset uses this socket, then we could infer what socket the motherboard uses. Inferring information like this is really tricky though because the web can be really noisy.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't do better on these searches. You're clearly a power searcher, and I share your frustration when it's really hard to find what you want using Google. I'll pass this article around within the search quality group at Google and see if we could do better on searches like these--thanks for the feedback.