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Giving up on Google

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Re: Giving up on Google

#101

Post by thaumaturgy »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #95
thaumaturgy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...).

It's great that Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin works for you, but not everyone wants to take that path (or knows how to). $50/year is worth it for some people not to have to diagnose Roundcube issues. 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.…

All of that is completely understandable, but -- unless they've changed recently -- Gmail's filtering is really pretty far behind from what it could be, and Gmail's interface is -- for me, and the clients I support -- a frequent source of complaints.

That's not to say it's bad, but rather that -- given Google's size and the ridiculous amount of smarts on its payroll -- it could be a lot better. It just doesn't seem to be what Google is focusing on these days.

I'll grant though that Gmail has, hands-down, the very best spam filtering in existence. I really don't know how you guys do that.

But ... just to put things in perspective, I think that's the only killer feature that Gmail has left. Otherwise, it's pretty vulnerable; any service provider could launch the same setup I have, on the really cheap VPS services available these days, and readily compete with Google's business mail hosting.

Re: Giving up on Google

#102

Post by thomas11 »

dRother wrote: post #78
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 sh…

This would make sense for the crowd here, but not for 90% of users whose searches are very fuzzy. So, another vote for "expert mode"...

Re: Giving up on Google

#103

Post by sans-serif »

jacquesm wrote: post #71
yellowbkpk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Here to claim my extra points. Btw, tried searching for Gmail messages in Thai before? It doesn't work.

Re: Giving up on Google

#104

Post by thomas11 »

jacquesm wrote: post #86
moultano wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's what you are worried about then it seems like you'd have trouble using the internet in general.

I'm not worried, it's just that the gggp of this comment mentioned that search history is protected by a password and so it 'should be safe from prying eyes.' All I did was point out that that data is stored on a server somewhere else and that there are lots of eyes that could be prying there. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are concerned about their internet use being monitored, for instance, dissident…

Any website that you use could store all kinds of data about you without even telling you. Not to mention your ISP, who knows everything! At least Google is making it clear via Google History that they do have the means to do it.

Re: Giving up on Google

#105

Post by Matt_Cutts »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #101
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that Dovecot + Postfix + Roundcube + Managesieve + SpamAssassin works for you, but not everyone wants to take that path (or knows how to). $50/year is worth it for some people not to have to diagnose Roundcube issues. 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.…

All of that is completely understandable, but -- unless they've changed recently -- Gmail's filtering is really pretty far behind from what it could be, and Gmail's interface is -- for me, and the clients I support -- a frequent source of complaints. That's not to say it's bad , but rather that -- given Google's size and the ridiculous amount of smarts on its payroll -- it could be a lot better. It just doesn't seem…

I tend to agree with you on filtering--I want the ability to filter on headers, for example. See http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/Tu7U17YACA8... where I made the argument that a startup could use Gmail OAuth to do filtering better than Gmail itself.

But I do think that Gmail Labs is pretty hard to beat. Labs like "Send and Archive," "Undo Send," and "Quick Links" save my bacon on a pretty regular basis.

Re: Giving up on Google

#106

Post by mkramlich »

Google may be becoming more optimized for the larger number of non-tech/non-elite users, while becoming less optimized for the smaller number of elite users. If so, we've seen this phenomenon happen with other businesses in the past, nothing new. A side effect of becoming popular with the masses.

Re: Giving up on Google

#107

Post by thaumaturgy »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #100

I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I thought I'd break them down: - [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 li…

Wow.

So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive.

Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year is great, and I was totally unaware of it. I'll update my post shortly with a note about that. Having something like that sticking right out on the left-hand side would be even better. :-)

I think I often see people complaining about search quality (here, and in the other HN thread I linked to from about a year back, as examples), but if you ask them about the specifics of the search, they don't remember. I think that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. Although it's at least partly laziness on the user's part, I think Google could view this as a huge amount of potentially beneficial information that they're missing out on. Trying to improve search results without knowing what problems people are having with them is challenging, at least.

It would be nifty if there were some kind of "these were not the search results I was looking for" quick form linked from certain types of search results.

Re: Giving up on Google

#108

Post by sorbus »

spooneybarger wrote: post #42
aantix wrote: post #17

This article inspired me to install the Duck Duck Go Search plugin ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161971/ ); I'm going to give it a week.

I would suggest more than that. After 1 week, I hadn't really seen what DDG added in value. My experience says, give it 2-4 weeks.

I'm inclined to think that if you can't see why a product is useful to use after a week, it's probably not worth it. But then, my experiences with DDG have mostly consisted of comparing its results with google, and finding that the interface is a lot less usable.

Re: Giving up on Google

#109

Post by Matt_Cutts »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #107
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #100

I left a few comments below, but I wanted to say thanks for mentioning some searches that Google didn't do well on. They're interesting searches, so I thought I'd break them down: - [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 li…

Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year i…

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better.

We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?"

I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.

Re: Giving up on Google

#110

Post by jacquesm »

sans-serif wrote: post #103
jacquesm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Here to claim my extra points. Btw, tried searching for Gmail messages in Thai before? It doesn't work.

Such a claim would need to be accompanied by proof ;)
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