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Giving up on Google

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Re: Giving up on Google

#111

Post by habith »

patrickaljord wrote: post #67
thaumaturgy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, I remember how great Google was when I started using it around 1999, compared to AltaVista or Metacrawler; it was great because it was able to find results that the other two just couldn't, and it did it quickly. Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again.

> Lately, I've found myself feeling like search is back in 1999 again. You're spoiled then.

> You're spoiled then.

Spoiled? I remember search being horrendous back in those days. It was almost exact word matching and it took hours to find relevant results. Google was a breath of fresh air back then (especially since they didn't run all those X10 ads and popups ala Yahoo!).

I've switched to Bing a few months ago for tin-foil-haty reasons, and also being disappointed in the way Google interpreted some of my queries (for some reason the plus sign doesn't mean anything anymore).

I occasionally use Google when I give up on finding something on Bing, but 99% of the time 4-5 results of the first page are pages I already found on Bing, with the rest being irrelevant results.

I too wasn't aware of the search tools that Matt Cutts mentioned above, I'll give it a try the next time I'm having a hard time finding something with a date restriction.

Re: Giving up on Google

#112

Post by eitland »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109
thaumaturgy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year i…

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm tryin…

I wonder if it would help to give some feedback to the ones that you actually took into account?

I think I've tried more than a couple of times to give some feedback about the search results. Seeing that nothing happened, and getting nothing but an automated response, I've stopped doing that.

Reporting flashing ads to the ad team worked better, they were removed later the same day.

Re: Giving up on Google

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Matt, it's great that you think enough of us here to give direct feedback. I wish I could give you some example searches too, but most of what has bugged me lately relates to stuff which might brush up against NDA terms, so I don't feel comfy giving specifics.

Overall I still love Google, I must use the search service 50 times a day so complaints about shortcomings are a bit like grumbling about the paintwork on my free new car :-) So I'll try and identify two recurring (and relatively new-feeling) headaches:

1. quotes. When I put it "in quotes" I don't want ti speell-checked, or cleaned, or made case-insensitive, or whatever else. I would rather get not results and experiment with other strings, than think I've got results that turn out not to be exactly what I searched for. It seems to me like punctuation often gets stripped even if it's inside quotes. For some kinds of searches involving bits of source code or so, this can be a drag.

2. Content farming. I know you are constantly struggling against people gaming the system and so forth. I don't blame Google when I get 50 results of generic junk referring to obscure search terms...the "find [niche product] resellers, hints, tips!" types that are totally generic. but what does piss me off is that a few months ago Google offered a button that would let zap such results, and I could label clutter as clutter. Now on a deep search, I often spend several minutes trying to think what terms are common enough to content farms that -excluding them will prune the results sufficiently that the remaining search results are worth checking one by one.

You remember that Bing ad where someone says something random and their geeky partner starts hypnotically chanting associated but unhelpful phrases, implying an overbroad result set? Sorry, but they had a point.

Re: Giving up on Google

#114

Post by bambax »

danilocampos wrote: post #48
petercooper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of any good examples now, but in some IDEs in the 80s and 90s they had an "expert mode" you could toggle on and off to extend the number of menu options and the like. A similar setting on Google would be great. I know a little of Google's syntax like the + and " workarounds, but having a literal search as default would be worthwhile for many users. I recall that I switched to Altavista back in the mid 9…

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.

YES!

At the very least, please give us an "allintext:" that actually works:

absolutely no stemming whatsoever

no "words were found in links pointing to this page" (this is the most infuriating thing ever)

and... no "you're a bot" crazyness (or captchas that normal people can solve...)

Re: Giving up on Google

#115

Post by btilly »

jacquesm wrote: post #71
yellowbkpk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not that I can detect. For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com. Extra points if you know what it stands for :)

Google Translate claims, "Find Motherboard Shock gate 775."

I don't know what that is supposed to be a reference to.

Re: Giving up on Google

#116

Post by kingsley_20 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109
thaumaturgy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year i…

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm tryin…

Why not ask permission to transmit the last few searches and a snapshot of the results. I mean, I usually only hit "give feedback" when i'm not finding the stuff I want. You'll probably be able to discern a lot from that.

Re: Giving up on Google

#117

Post by diziet »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #65
diziet wrote: post #37

Really curious why the website cuts the right border of the text without allowing js for some external site...

The external site is my business server, which hosts the JS package that the personal site uses. I wasn't aware of the border issue until just a bit ago. Sorry 'bout that.

You fixed it real quick, and I quite very much liked the scale tool.

Re: Giving up on Google

#118

Post by s3graham »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #93
VBprogrammer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the problem is that for many people google is the internet. Even for me (pretty technically minded) if a few google searches doesn't find what I'm looking for it isn't on the internet, or might as well not be. I don't think I've even tried turning to another search engine in several years.

It's tricky. Google gets well over 1B searches a day. And each week, 1B users search on Google. Most of those searchers aren't as savvy as HN folks. They do things like misspell ~10% of queries, not to mention searching in weird ways. Only one double-quote in the query? How should we interpret that? So Google has power search operators and we introduce new tools like the left-hand side searching tools, but we also ha…

> Only one double-quote in the query? How should we interpret that?

My vote: "Syntax error on line 1" with no further hints. ;)

Re: Giving up on Google

#119

Post by thaumaturgy »

s3graham wrote: post #118
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tricky. Google gets well over 1B searches a day. And each week, 1B users search on Google. Most of those searchers aren't as savvy as HN folks. They do things like misspell ~10% of queries, not to mention searching in weird ways. Only one double-quote in the query? How should we interpret that? So Google has power search operators and we introduce new tools like the left-hand side searching tools, but we also ha…

> Only one double-quote in the query? How should we interpret that? My vote: "Syntax error on line 1" with no further hints. ;)

...but I would just Google tha-- oh.

Re: Giving up on Google

#120

Post by danilocampos »

bambax wrote: post #114
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.

YES! At the very least, please give us an "allintext:" that actually works: absolutely no stemming whatsoever no "words were found in links pointing to this page" (this is the most infuriating thing ever) and... no "you're a bot" crazyness (or captchas that normal people can solve...)

Don't even get me started with Google's captchas. They're unreadable even for humans.
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