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Giving up on Google

robsheldon.com

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Re: Giving up on Google

#151

Post by arethuza »

petercooper wrote: post #82
RexRollman wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I wish someone I like, like Colin Percival, would start an email service. I like the way he runs Tarsnap.

The problem with starting an e-mail service is the crazy level of administration and sysadmin headaches it induces merely to be able to reliably send e-mail to 90%+ of endpoints.. let alone anything else. The engineering problem is a pretty interesting one, but the headache of ensuring your users can actually get their mail someplace makes it seem dull or insurmountable to solo developers.

Having spent far too much time figuring out problems in a fairly large email system (120 servers, world-wide, just about every MTA known, including Notes) I can heartily agree - there are just so many obscure ways that email can fail that it's really not funny.

Re: Giving up on Google

#152

Post by tristanperry »

known wrote: post #99

Google "search engine"

Oh. Wow. EPIC, EPIC FAIL.

Actually, they're doing it for other things too:

[web based email] [adverts for publishers] [traffic analytics]

I'm sure there's more.

Wow. That truly is an epic fail. Google have removed Google from the SERPs.

LOL! I love(d?) Google, but they are definitely screwing something up somewhere. These rubbishy results occur when I'm logged out too (well, I don't have Web History or personalized search enabled so I guess that's n/a)

Re: Giving up on Google

#153

Post by c00ki3s »

thomas11 wrote: post #104
jacquesm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not worried, it's just that the gggp of this comment mentioned that search history is protected by a password and so it 'should be safe from prying eyes.' All I did was point out that that data is stored on a server somewhere else and that there are lots of eyes that could be prying there. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are concerned about their internet use being monitored, for instance, dissident…

Any website that you use could store all kinds of data about you without even telling you. Not to mention your ISP, who knows everything! At least Google is making it clear via Google History that they do have the means to do it.

https should stop your ISP from spying, no?

Re: Giving up on Google

#154

Post by Matt_Cutts »

nhebb wrote: post #129
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Okay, here goes. Lately I have been doing a lot of C# searches. Google suggest strips out the hash (#) from the suggest items, so I keep getting faked out by likely C programming matches. Can you please stop stripping off the "#"? Otherwise, I'll need to attach a hot wire to my down…

I'm pretty sure that several search quality people are reading this thread now, but I'll try to mention this explicitly to people. Thanks for the suggestion.

Normally Google doesn't allows searches for punctuation, because doing so would swell the index size a lot for very little return in terms of helpful searches. But since we're engineers, we do search some punctuation, e.g. underscores so you can search for sprintf_s, and terms like C# and F#. I'll ask whether the # can carry through into Suggest.

Re: Giving up on Google

#155

Post by Matt_Cutts »

kingsley_20 wrote: post #116
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "give feedback" form does automatically populate the feedback form with what you were searching for when you clicked to give feedback. We haven't tried transmitting several searches because people would probably complain, and it's not clear how much previous searches would help. But when we revamped the feedback form, that's one of the big wins we got from making it dynamic instead of a generic form.

Re: Giving up on Google

#156

Post by Matt_Cutts »

eitland wrote: post #112
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the problems with replying to every piece of feedback is that a link on Google's search page--even a link that many people don't notice--gets a huge volume of feedback. And the resulting feedback can be pretty unhelpful ("I lost my cat. I think you should build a search for lost cats.") So we don't have the resources to reply to all of those. Personally, I would like if we offered a lower-volume feedback method with a higher hit rate of good feedback. Hacker News is acting as the prequalifier in this instance, but I find that people annoyed enough to blog often provide good feedback too.

Overall I agree with you, but even if we had that channel, many times the feedback would be: "Yup, that's a bad set of search results. We'll try to come up with a way to make it better, but it might be a while. Getting an algorithm to do better on this search will be hard."

Re: Giving up on Google

#157

Post by Matt_Cutts »

sankoz wrote: post #125
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have given feedback on search for "BMTC" not returning the official website of BMTC (bmtcinfo.com). (2-3 months back). But the search results haven't changed since then.

I did a quick check, and that website has some issues. Here's a wget on bmtcinfo.com:

$ wget http://bmtcinfo.com/ --2010-09-14 09:01:43-- http://bmtcinfo.com/ Resolving bmtcinfo.com... failed: Name or service not known. wget: unable to resolve host address `bmtcinfo.com'

The url http://bmtcinfo.com/ just doesn't work in a browser or with wget. And trying to fetch the "www" version of the website, it does a 302 redirect to a deeper url. 302 redirects are the ones that don't pass PageRank. The last time we tried to crawl the page, we got an error--probably from the non-www version. I'll see what we can do to find this site better, but returning errors instead of content to Googlebot really hurts that effort.

By the way, we provide a free webmaster console that would let the owner of this domain self-diagnose these issues. The "Fetch as Googlebot" feature lets the owner send Googlebot to fetch a url on their site and see what Googlebot saw, including errors and redirects. If the owner of bmtcinfo.com were to use that tool, they'd probably notice the errors pretty quickly.

Re: Giving up on Google

#158

Post by jacquesm »

saulhoward wrote: post #148
jacquesm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

> หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 'Haa men bord chok ket 775' = 'Find motherboard socket 775.' I would have thought that 'socket' would be a direct English transliteration, and use ซ (s) not ช (ch) though. Are you in Thailand, Jacques? Also, what makes you think this is such an uncommon phrase? It may not rival English, but there are plenty of Thai speakers out there, in many countries.

> Are you in Thailand, Jacques?

I wish.

On google.com it would be an uncommon phrase. On the Thai version of google not so much I guess.

Re: Giving up on Google

#159

Post by fr0sty »

studer wrote: post #77
arohner wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. I've had this break for me all the time when searching for programming terms. Proof: Google for "what we have here is failure to communicate" http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... The first hit is the wiki article on the quote (good), but the exact search string is not present on the page.

Click "cached", and you get the explanation: "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: what we have here is failure to communicate"

This is one of the worst 'features' I have been fighting recently (along with most of the other beefs around here). I am trying to find an appliance review for a stove prone to breaking so I search:

"Brand Model 1234 broken control panel"

And get an aggregate review page with a mention of broken control panels for another model and brand on which my model and brand are not listed....

I'm glad that my search term is in a link pointing to this page, but that is worth less than nothing to me...

Re: Giving up on Google

#160

Post by ntoshev »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #154
nhebb wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Okay, here goes. Lately I have been doing a lot of C# searches. Google suggest strips out the hash (#) from the suggest items, so I keep getting faked out by likely C programming matches. Can you please stop stripping off the "#"? Otherwise, I'll need to attach a hot wire to my down…

I'm pretty sure that several search quality people are reading this thread now, but I'll try to mention this explicitly to people. Thanks for the suggestion. Normally Google doesn't allows searches for punctuation, because doing so would swell the index size a lot for very little return in terms of helpful searches. But since we're engineers, we do search some punctuation, e.g. underscores so you can search for sprin…

You should really automate this feedback process by mining the web for examples where people complain about Google quality AND they mention the search queries themselves :-)
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