Search Still Sucks
techcrunch.com
Search Still Sucks
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Search Still Sucks
#2Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Re: Search Still Sucks
#3Btw Matt Cutts' statement "Google's algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken." is weird.
(http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/36502687868665856)
All evidence indicates that JC Penny was ranked #1 until the NYT provided Google with the evidence that it had collected. Google then acted on the evidence. As a result of those actions, JC Penny's rank dropped from #1 to #71.
It is funny that he should say "Google's algorithms had started to work". Presumably, the algorithm doesn't depend on a New York Times reporter telling Google that they were being gamed :)
Re: Search Still Sucks
#4At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results.
If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace Google; it seems to me that the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over.
Re: Search Still Sucks
#5Btw Matt Cutts' statement "Google's algorithms had started to work; manual action also taken." is weird. ( http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/36502687868665856 ) All evidence indicates that JC Penny was ranked #1 until the NYT provided Google with the evidence that it had collected. Google then acted on the evidence. As a result of those actions, JC Penny's rank dropped from #1 to #71. It is funny that he should say…
I didn't understand that comment either until I read his comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212336
Algorithmic changes went into play 1.5 weeks ago and had started to drop JCPenny, then the spam team gave them some cement shoes.
Re: Search Still Sucks
#6Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content.
I think Google results could vastly be improved if they tied together their normal rankings with a "how many people have bookmarked this URL (and to some extent, URLs from this domain)" metric. I've worked closely with Delicious' set of data, and it's nothing short of incredible. Billions of instances of people categorizing sites and vouching for their quality are going unused in the search space.
Re: Search Still Sucks
#7Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content. I think Google results could…
This is a type of sentience analysis. Google could also give better weights for links that are associated with things like "I love Ebay", rather than "[example.com] is a fraud!", but they don't yet (AFAIK).
Re: Search Still Sucks
#8Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content. I think Google results could…
If black hat seos started to believe Google was paying specific attention to Delicious bookmarks, Delicious would be flooded with fake accounts faster than you can say "link farm".
History of search:
1. New company releases new search engine, better than the competition because it pays attention to a previously ignored signal.
2. Seos work out how to game the signal.
3. New search engine is now as crappy as the search engines it replaced.
Really, internet search is like macroeconomics: soon after you understand {how to prevent recessions, how to find the best webpages}, the problem vanishes and is replaced by something even more complex and incomprehensible. Furthermore, this has already happened.
Re: Search Still Sucks
#9At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results. If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace G…
I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow.
Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search?
Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job than a Google search.
Re: Search Still Sucks
#10Apparently, this blog author has been ousted as "bribed by Microsoft for secret advertising disguised in posts"
There has been a lot "google search sucks" submission from Techcrunch lately. This was starting to feel a little weird. So I googled "Michael Arrington Microsoft" and got this :
http://techrights.org/2010/02/07/michael-arrington-microsoft...
Are people aware of this ? is it old news ? Is HN being spammed ?