I think it's also a function of people trying to game how Google's engine operates.
Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#32I've actually noticed the inverse problem with some non-tech-related searches. Politics is a fine example: try and find an article about a 2002 House vote on Social Security and there's no chance you'll find it; the results are all present day. Strange that with regard to current events the web seems to have little historical memory, and yet with regard to current technology it has too much.
Google News has an archive search that is useful for that type of query.
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=2002+house+vote+socia...
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#33Yep. I never used to use search operators unless I was looking for something really specific. Nowadays I get completely irrelevant results and I am forced to quote strings and explicitly specify term precedence, conditionals and other regexy stuff. Last night I was searching for the syntax of DEFTYPE when used with various types (i.e. MEMBER, SATISFIES, OR, etc.) and the #1 his for "deftype member" was the personal M…
They'd probably do well to have a seperate 'technical search' for searching for things related to technical matters, eg programming languages, physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, etc. And remove the casual stuff (facebook, myspace, pages that are clearly not about a technical subject, etc) from that index. It would probably be a highly praised feature to seperate off a second index like that, as specifically s…
Having separate indexes and separate searches for sub-domains of knowledge is an interesting idea. The original idea of PageRank was that each link constituted a 'vote' for a page. Perhaps different epistemic communities on the internet use links to mean different things. So, the meaning of links on technical webpages is slightly different from the meaning of links on social websites. Interesting idea to play around with.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#34vldtr is now a couple of months old. Google has about 22 pages in their index, Bing 8. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Avldt... http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Avldtr.com As long as the Google has the most up to date index there is no good alternative for me. You mention trying Yahoo. Did it give you better results?
Don't use this as a metric. The site:www.example.com syntax does NOT return all the pages in a site indexed by the search engine.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#35Back to the Altavista days of +search +must +include +plus +signs +"and quotation marks"
Seriously, the problem is advanced users get unexpected results with the query expansion and refinement layers they've added on. While dropping obscure words is helpful when grandpa has misformed queries, it's maddening for a technical user looking for a very specific, infrequent keyword. However for grandpa, it's probably a better experience for a generalized result.
Using +'s works well enough, but it's disappointing we have to use a less efficient method of querying now.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#36Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/. Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#37http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=... Let me guess: 1. Google's Pagerank patent is about to expire, and they have to make something new? 2. New ranking algorithm adjustment to compete with Bing but failed? And similar discussions on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9qro1/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s6p2/
The pagerank patent isn't really relevant anymore as the search algorithm has so many more components and variants now. Pagerank as it is defined is a much smaller signal than people think.
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#38Yes, and this is why I started Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/ . Thanks for posting specific cases--they help me immensely. Anyone else have more?
I really have to applaud your efforts on that front. I've been using duckduckgo on and off for some time now and I must say I'm mighty impressed. The best part is the keyboard style navigation and the big clean look. Always retain those two. :)
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#39vldtr is now a couple of months old. Google has about 22 pages in their index, Bing 8. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Avldt... http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Avldtr.com As long as the Google has the most up to date index there is no good alternative for me. You mention trying Yahoo. Did it give you better results?
Where did you get that weird google.com/#hl... link from? It broke in my browser (the redirect from google.com didn't take it in to account when it bounced me to google.co.uk), but I've not seen URLs like that for google.com before.
It's a normal Google url since Google started using ajax. I also get it when I go to google.co.uk and search for something.
See also here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=464393
Re: Ask HN: do you feel Google search result quality has gone down?
#40I've used google since it was google.stanford.edu, and it's clear to me the results have suffered. My feeling is that two of the problems are SEO and feedback effects of google's own popularity. SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. And it works (sorta). Just consider crap sites like Experts Exchange that we've only learned about because they pollute many…
So, do you think it's time to start adding a top links and help them out?
I have started tailoring my searches in odd ways to help them out. Ex: Adding a the year when I want current results. But, without useful links it's all GIGO.