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Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

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Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#281

Post by cbs »

tedsuo wrote: post #50
cbs wrote: post #37

Guys, unless you're actually a player, save yourself the headache and don't get caught up in this little valley tiff. I think SPYW is dumb, but google is trying something to improve search results, it happens to use data that they have on the user. I don't think they need permission from everyone in the valley with a sign-in service they can't crawl before they're allowed to make changes that are meant to improve sea…

“Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.” -L…

It is important that they're straying, I'm not particularly happy with it myself, but thats a somewhat separate issue because I hardly think that the criticism they've been getting from their main tech competitors is altruistic concern that google stick to its principles.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#282

Post by salimane »

salimane wrote: post #270

what I haven't seen in the previous comments is that people naively don't learn from past experiences or other failures. Now let me explain : - CURRENTLY, we can safely say Google core product is search and at least CURRENTLY people still needs "google search". - will it be the same in the FUTURE ? well, you don't have to know the answer, but I'm sure some crazy numbers crunching happen every day at Google and those…

thanks for the downvote instead of discussing. if you can't discuss, why are you downvoting ?

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#283

Post by toddh »

Hominem wrote: post #88
toddh wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideally wouldn't it find the best result? G+ and farm.* seem equally likely to be poor. I did an image search for something like Empire State Building and my G+ results showed first. The results sucked.

I honestly don't know if it g+ will give better results for all searches or even any searches. When I search for "digital camera" the G+ results I get are people I know talking about cameras and sharing links about cameras.I think that is better than blog spam and content farms. My main point was without something like +1 they are in a never ending arms race, they needed to disrupt that cycle of tweeks and return to…

Definitely better than blog spam and content farms, but I was hoping those weren't my only options :-) I would like the highest signal content for the aspect of digital cameras I'm interested in, regardless of source. Using G+ as a mechanical proxy for relevance makes sense of course, but I don't think it gives the best results. I faced this what looking up coffee makers too. There are these search ruts you just can't get out of.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#284

Post by amstr »

earl wrote: post #242
jrockway wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is that people feel forced into agreeing with Google's decisions when they don't, and people don't like being forced into doing something. As an example, say you won't use Google+ because you don't like their account naming policies. That's fine, don't visit plus.google.com, don't use it, and it doesn't exist to you. But when Plus results start appearing in search, a product that you like, you are…

Google+ is close to blackmail. Read what Rand from seomoz has written about it [1:2] (example quote: "[...] if SPYW continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it's been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers"). Google is using their dominance in search to create side benefits for…

Regarding SEO: The Facebook "Like" button for instance has been embeddable on any page for awhile now and affects results for FB searches, ads, etc. So people have been playing the "Facebook Like" game alongside generalized SEO for awhile now and have not found it terribly difficult. In fact the "+1" is pretty much a clone of the "Like" button, so what's novel here?

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#285

Post by tedivm »

myko wrote: post #279
tedivm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Data Liberation program is all about being able to move your data from google to anywhere else. It has nothing to do with privacy.

How is removing one's data entirely from a product not related to privacy?

The data liberation thing is about adding data to Google, or copying the data out of Google so other services can use it. I may be wrong, but I have not seen anything that says you can use it to actually delete the information from Google's servers (if I'm wrong, please show me).

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#286

Post by mvgoogler »

robk wrote: post #271
mvgoogler wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The search quality team loves to get specific examples of search results that you don't find helpful. If you are getting low quality results the best thing you can do is send them feedback. You could use the form at - https://www.google.com/quality_form?q=google+search+quality&... I doubt Amit Singhal would object to receiving a specific report about bad search results.

There's little incentive in filling out a form that disappears into the ether. Given that Google's other web-based support tools are mostly useless and unanswered (Gmail support for example), this is not much an incentive to waste time filling out another form and likely getting no reply whatsoever.

I know that the search quality team loves getting specific examples of bad search results. I know this both from talking to them and from seeing how they interact with people on forums (HN in particular :-) )

See, for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277867

I don't work on search quality, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you send specific examples to the search quality team, either through the feedback form, or some other means - heck send it to Matt Cutts - it will be looked at and used to improve search quality.

The more specific you can be, the better.

"Searches for bikes suck for me" isn't very useful :-)

"When I enter the query 'blah blah blah', the following urls (url1, url2, url3, ...) are completely irrelevant to me." Even better, say why you think the urls are irrelevant.

If you submit reports like this, I can promise you that the search quality team will take them seriously and will praise your name (if possibly only internally :-) )

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#289

Post by landhar »

hrktb wrote: post #277
danilocampos wrote: post #56

A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do…

Totally agree, and this whole thread allowed me to understand very clearly my gripes about the evolution of google search. I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches,…

Very well said.

I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#290

Post by landhar »

dkarl wrote: post #247
6ren wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention that German is just one language You can add more than one language. If you'd checked up on it, you would have seen that. I perceive this as complaining about advice without following it, and I find it annoying. If you're still angry (and it sounds legitimate, especially if there was a subtle hint of a problem, but not enough to register fully), that explains where you're coming from, which puzzled m…

Not sure why I thought I couldn't respond to you directly, but I deleted the other comment and moved it here where it belongs: Re the "just one language" thing, I can imagine I'm not making sense, because I'm not really communicating the context of how irrationally enraged I am over this. The truth is that I only enabled a couple of languages because I was just too angry and frustrated to enable the rest. I know it d…

I faced the same problem. I am fluent in 4 languages and can work my way on a few others. But the problem is not that it's limited to an arbitrary number of languages. The problem is that it doesn't feel anymore like what I'm getting back from any query is the full web.
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