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The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

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Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#31

Post by nevi-me »

ninkendo wrote: post #25
InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google…

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results fr…

They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#32

Post by Wilya »

nevi-me wrote: post #31
ninkendo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results fr…

They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.

I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could improve the quality of my search results.

Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#33

Post by hga »

hrktb wrote: post #26
chris_wot wrote: post #8

Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?

For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness. For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns t…

Interesting.

I get Wikipedia's Table Tennis entry first (I do use Wikipedia a lot). The first page includes 5 local/state related links, also has an "In-depth articles" section at the bottom with three items. The 2nd page is good as well, I personally can't complain, although I still rue the day they zapped the + operator.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#34

Post by 7952 »

ht_th wrote: post #9
reitanqild wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem was it showed very clearly googles lack of care for search power users. The plus operator was just one problem. Soon after they started fuzzing words in doubleqoutes and at some point they even fuzzed verbatim searches. (Luckily it now works to some degree again.)

The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about t…

What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#35

Post by m_mueller »

ninkendo wrote: post #25
InclinedPlane wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shitty thing was that they dropped the + operator at the same time they significantly increased the "fuzziness" of their search algorithm. For some searches it might have helped, but for extremely targeted or highly technical searches it was a disaster. Almost as horrible as the bad old days when search engines tended to use "or" for search queries instead of "and". Still it's very, very difficult to tell google…

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results fr…

The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't they?

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#36

Post by diydsp »

7952 wrote: post #34
ht_th wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user. I have no idea about t…

What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.

I've said this before, but google search is turning into the yellow pages.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#37

Post by Vik1ng »

marcosdumay wrote: post #14
chris_wot wrote: post #8

Is there a search engine that is as accurate as Google? Does Bing really stack up?

As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but always failed. The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.

Tried it too. Wasn't that happy. I was also never a fan of different search options in my browser bar so the !bang feature wasn't really my thing either.

Now I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap, because I think at least that stands a chance against google maps and might even help some other search engines. DuckDuckGo is using it and maybe Bing will at one point, at least that would explain why they provide aerial images.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#38

Post by ninkendo »

nevi-me wrote: post #31
ninkendo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results fr…

They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.

Right, and it told me that the CPAN pages were with "ruby" omitted. But why would I want those search results? Those are obviously not what I searched for.

And they weren't at the bottom, they were actually the first result on the list.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#39

Post by ninkendo »

Wilya wrote: post #32
nevi-me wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do try search combinations with some words omitted, and right at the bottom of each query they tell you which part of your phrase they have excluded.

I also get this behaviour all the time, and I have no idea how it could improve the quality of my search results. Yes, if I search for "Windows 7 NAT", dropping the NAT keyword returns more results. But none of them will give me the information I'm looking for.

Exactly. Searches with less results are nearly always better than searches with more... I don't know why Google would think it's helpful to include more, but clearly less relevant results. (By definition, too. If a result is lacking one of your search terms, it's less relevant to what you searched for, strictly speaking.)

This is especially true when what I'm searching for yields almost no results. That's how I typically know that what I'm searching for was probably bogus to begin with. But when the first page is full of a bunch of fuzzed-out results that are only tangentially related to what I searched for, I now have to skim through a page full of results to realize that Google just gave up and decided to omit several of my terms.

Re: The Feature Google Killed The + Command For Is Now Dead

#40

Post by ninkendo »

m_mueller wrote: post #35
ninkendo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes when I'm searching I get the feeling Google is dropping things I'm asking for in order to give me more results. But there's no way they're dumb enough to think that's helpful, right? They do understand that people want less - but more relevant - results, instead of just having more useless ones? Like just the other day I was searching for "ruby net::ldap " and it decided to put, front and center, results fr…

The question is: Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index? For me, so far, getting these kinds of results is just synonymous to 'no match found', so I move on. In some edge cases it might be helpful to get these results, in most cases I just change my query. But if google were actually hiding good results from you this way, they'd be really bad at their job wouldn't the…

> Did it ever happen to you when google actually had this exact combination in their index?

Yup!

Try searching for "ruby net::ldap search", without the quotes. For me, a CPAN page is the second result. (This is even logged out, in a chrome incognito window, so no cookies are sent to google.) That page doesn't have "ruby" or anything related to "ruby" on it, at all.

But even if I was searching for something esoteric like an error message, it's much more helpful to give me no results than it is to give me irrelevant ones. Irrelevant results just waste my time clicking/skimming through them, where an empty result set will signal to me very clearly that what I'm searching for doesn't make sense.

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