121–130 of 168 posts
Why does Google deeply index those useless telephone directory sites? Try searching for the impossible U.S. phone number "307-139-2345" and you'll see a bunch of "who called me?" or "reverse phone number lookup" sites. Virtually all of those sites are complete garbage. They make no attempt to collect numbers from telephone directories or from the web. They won't identify a number as being the main phone number for Di…
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If Google was so evil, why would we purposefully send traffic to sites where we only get a percentage cut of the revenue? I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to open this can of worms, did it have something else printed on its label? Phone number lookup sites are almost certainly a) easily detectable; and b) low traffic. If Google only gets a percentage cut of this, why index them for fractions of pennies per year?
It's because Google's constraint is number of engineer-attention-hours. This kind of thing probably just isn't a priority, when they have a billion other things they could work on. Keep in mind that Google is not a product company, they are a data company. They work on the biggest most impactful items, and don't have a lot of time for one-offs. Finally, it might not be clear at all that these sites should be removed…
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Their A/B test told them to do it, without wondering if they should do it Basically their engagement numbers were better for a larger amount of people by making search engines counterintuitive for early adopters. We personally need a good robotic search engine that indexes like a robot. Everyone else needs a semi-sentient thing that makes many assumptions about what they want to see.
It seems like DDG is getting lots better :)
I still use DDG as I find it generally less annoying but I really don't get why they too had to start behaving like the pre-Google search engines.
It really angers me that, despite the fact that it may be essentially perfectly what I'm looking for, if it was published long ago, Google may refuse to find it. Something like a news search engine would definitely be better off prioritising the new results, but for something more general-purpose, it's an absolutely horrible choice. I know this may be a bit of an edge-case, but I frequently search for service informa…
Meanwhile my original (with the same basic information [which I researched personally rather than stole {not to mention I list my sources}]) languishes on page 4 of the Google search results. It grinds my gears on occasion.
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No they don't do an admirable job if they send you to scraped rather than original content. They're ruining the web. While Google still has fantastic, one-of-a-kind services such as Translate, Search isn't one of them anymore, and we should stop cheering at it and relying on it.
Hmm. I keep getting warnings about responding to quickly. Perhaps my account is under attack. Setting that aside, google has done good things. Today, not so much. It’s never too late to turn the ship around. Google can still be awesome. Our opinions aren’t that different. I don’t think big g can turn it around, but I’m rooting for them.
Google can't still be awesome, as they're no longer seeking to disrupt an existing market and burning through venture capital while doing everything and anything (including providing superior search results, and making ethical business practices part of their brand) to attract users.
Rooting for a profit motivated transnational entity in the manner one would for a sports team exposes the insidious nature of brand narratives and the exploitable irrationality of our own interactions with them.
> Other things were weirder, like this old post being soft recognized as a 404 Not Found response. My web server is properly configured and quite capable of sending correct HTTP response codes, so ignoring standards in that regard is just craziness on Google's part. I've noticed Google does this when you don't seem to have a lot of content on the page. I think it "guesses" that short pages are poorly-marked 404s.
That's right. Really empty pages that serve a 200 are recognized as "soft 404s". The idea is to detect error pages that are erroneously serving 200 instead. It's usually pretty good about detecting actual errors, but I've seen a false positive here and there.
The "world's information store", or whatever their altruist goal was that fooled people, is certainly disorganized and untrustworthy these days.
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If Google was so evil, why would we purposefully send traffic to sites where we only get a percentage cut of the revenue? I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to open this can of worms, did it have something else printed on its label? Phone number lookup sites are almost certainly a) easily detectable; and b) low traffic. If Google only gets a percentage cut of this, why index them for fractions of pennies per year?
There may be cases where we drop low traffic sites from our index, which is separate from the search index. I don't how much of that is public information, so can't go into detail.
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You have hit on a major problem there. Stack Overflow was once the fount of all useful genius grade knowledge, but times change and some of the top answers are plain wrong. Take for example the 'how do I centre a div' type of question. You will get to find an answer with thousands of up-votes that will be some horrendous margin hack type of thing where you set the width of the content and have some counter intuitive…
There are plenty of developers, myself included, that would prefer to approach tasks like this without having to ever lay our fingers on CSS.
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You have hit on a major problem there. Stack Overflow was once the fount of all useful genius grade knowledge, but times change and some of the top answers are plain wrong. Take for example the 'how do I centre a div' type of question. You will get to find an answer with thousands of up-votes that will be some horrendous margin hack type of thing where you set the width of the content and have some counter intuitive…
There are plenty of developers, myself included, that would prefer to approach tasks like this without having to ever lay our fingers on CSS.
I am intrigued as to how you do this simple centering task without using CSS - it is a web page we are talking about here, not some other application that has sensible layout tools.
So please share what you know - it is a simple task - how do I center something - anything - vertically and or horizontally - in HTML without using CSS?
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That's right. Really empty pages that serve a 200 are recognized as "soft 404s". The idea is to detect error pages that are erroneously serving 200 instead. It's usually pretty good about detecting actual errors, but I've seen a false positive here and there.
It's almost like they should queue these into a human-reviewed dashboard before, yknow, being wrong. The "world's information store", or whatever their altruist goal was that fooled people, is certainly disorganized and untrustworthy these days.