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Giving up on Google

robsheldon.com

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Re: Giving up on Google

#181

Post by didip »

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.

Interesting, 1 thing to add on that hypothesis, right around April 2010, Google dropped a lot of pages from its index. That really messed up SEO play companies.

As a proof, search on any seo play company on Alexa around April 2010

Re: Giving up on Google

#182

Post by SkyMarshal »

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…

I find myself resorting to 'Show Search Tools' -> 'Past x' more and more frequently these days. As the web ages, it seems the proportion of old and potentially outdated information in Google's index to new information is increasing.

While Google Instant is technically impressive, the feeling of speed is undone whenever I have to next manually restrict the results to the past year or 6 months or whatever (and sometimes experiment with multiple durations) in order to filter out discussions from 2008 and earlier. Same with using regular search as well.

Hence, might I suggest you guys consider something like inverting the default search, to only include pages created or modified within the past year (or whatever duration you calculate most optimal for returning relevant results)? Or perhaps changing the PageRank weighting of recency, at least for domains that change rapidly. I know this could cause some problems, and I'm not sure the web is quite at the age where this is necessary yet, but I think there's an inflection point coming soon where more searchers will expect recent results in their top 10 rather than years-old pages.

It might also be worth moving the duration filter up one tier of UI so it is both clearly visible on the search results page, only takes one instead of two clicks to activate. The OP isn't the only one who's recently needed searches restricted by age and didn't realize just from the UI that this could be done. A few months ago I made a similar complaint on another forum and was informed of the same thing - use Search Tools -> Past X. But it's not obvious to do that on the current UI.

Re: Giving up on Google

#183

Post by Matt_Cutts »

ntoshev wrote: post #160
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that several search quality people are reading this thread now, but I'll try to mention this explicitly to people. Thanks for the suggestion. Normally Google doesn't allows searches for punctuation, because doing so would swell the index size a lot for very little return in terms of helpful searches. But since we're engineers, we do search some punctuation, e.g. underscores so you can search for sprin…

You should really automate this feedback process by mining the web for examples where people complain about Google quality AND they mention the search queries themselves :-)

Thanks, nhebb. ntoshev, now you're thinking like a Google employee. :)

Re: Giving up on Google

#184

Post by Matt_Cutts »

sankoz wrote: post #178
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a quick check, and that website has some issues. Here's a wget on bmtcinfo.com: $ wget http://bmtcinfo.com/ --2010-09-14 09:01:43-- http://bmtcinfo.com/ Resolving bmtcinfo.com... failed: Name or service not known. wget: unable to resolve host address `bmtcinfo.com' The url http://bmtcinfo.com/ just doesn't work in a browser or with wget. And trying to fetch the "www" version of the website, it does a 302 redire…

Thanks a lot for the reply. I have passed on this info to bmtcinfo.com through their feedback form.

If you get through to them, it looks like a couple DNS servers in their chain have been serving us NXDOMAINs. Point them to sb[12].mooo.com, hosted on afraid.org, and ask them to let Googlebot in. :)

Re: Giving up on Google

#185

Post by all »

This article prompted me to do likewise. For the past 24 hours and running, I have used Duck Duck Go exclusively instead of Google. It is like a breath of fresh air. I tried DDG a few months back and it was a bit on the rough side. It has made tremendous strides in the intervening time.

As for Google, they have gone past their prime. As the other comments note, 2008 was the peak. Yahoo is in the midst of what may be the longest running identity crisis ever to hit a company. And the name of the game for both Google and Bing is to keep you on their site with their advertisements for as long as they possibly can. Like some tentacled monster, they don't want to just serve you and let you go. The cheap tricks masquerading as a flashy UI ruin the user experience and make me not want to go back. Duck Duck Go actually keeps you coming by serving salient information (aka 'value') and then lets you get on with life. Kinda reminds me of the difference between the personality ethic and the character ethic from Covey's 7HHEP.

This was a great post. Thanks for putting it forward.

Re: Giving up on Google

#187

Post by Sid_ram »

I love the privacy policy on DDG - so elegant and clear. If google wants my business, I need to be able to u derstand their privacy policy. I am too suspicious.

Re: Giving up on Google

#188

Post by dairem »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #72
pyre wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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…

How does that work for people with accessibility issues, e.g. people using screen readers?

Re: Giving up on Google

#189

Post by three14 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #91
Alex3917 wrote: post #69

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…

Alex3917, do you remember the sites (or the query) you did?

I'm curious if Alex3917's response to this was set to dead as a result of automated spam filters or if there's something else going on.

Re: Giving up on Google

#190

Post by dRother »

thomas11 wrote: post #102
dRother wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

I think anyone might find it confusing when they search for something specific and their words are automatically changed - except for spelling fixes.
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