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Giving up on Google

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Re: Giving up on Google

#161

Post by Matt_Cutts »

squidsoup wrote: post #57
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.

Which begs the question, are there regions of the web that just simply aren't indexed?

Absolutely there are, despite our efforts. See the bmtcinfo.com example mentioned elsewhere on this page. But normally there's a good reason if we don't have a page, e.g. bmtcinfo.com returns an error unless you add a "www" in front of it.

Re: Giving up on Google

#162

Post by nhebb »

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're a Good Egg, Matt.

Re: Giving up on Google

#163

Post by Matt_Cutts »

anigbrowl wrote: post #113
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 f…

Thanks for the feedback. Punctuation is tricky, because it only adds value for power searchers, but indexing it would swell the index size quite a lot. Otherwise, using double-quotes should do an exact search.

On content farms, we've definitely heard that feedback. One point up for debate is whether to respond with algorithms-only, or whether we should update our quality guidelines to call out low-quality content farms as a type of webspam. Both DuckDuckGo and Blekko seem delighted to remove sites that most people don't like from the search results. Here's a link for DDG for example: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25532/ . The question is: would you feel comfortable if Google removed results that a lot of people don't like from our index? And how do you balance the goal of reducing clutter and junk with the goal of being fair and comprehensive?

Re: Giving up on Google

#164

Post by BrandonM »

xentronium wrote: post #150
newman314 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would indeed be awesome. Google Image Search also breaks horribly with FF and Ghostery installed. Google Instant still does horribly at my favorite test search word: Cardinal Do they know if I'm looking for a) the bird b) the team c) guy with the funny hat ? A: No.

You could as well be searching for: d) A term from the Set theory e) Integer type Too much ambiguity.

Too much ambiguity? http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=cardinal

Re: Giving up on Google

#165

Post by logicalmind »

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.

For regular search, their SSL search page https://www.google.com/ is very close to "2008 mode". No luck on the image search part though.

Re: Giving up on Google

#166

Post by MikeCapone »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #163
anigbrowl wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Thanks for the feedback. Punctuation is tricky, because it only adds value for power searchers, but indexing it would swell the index size quite a lot. Otherwise, using double-quotes should do an exact search. On content farms, we've definitely heard that feedback. One point up for debate is whether to respond with algorithms-only, or whether we should update our quality guidelines to call out low-quality content far…

One potential problem of removing links that people report is that it's possible to game that system. You'll soon have spammers sending a massive amount of requests to have their competitors removed form the index.

Re: Giving up on Google

#167

Post by moultano »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #143
moultano wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo certainly tries to do that too, although I guess you're getting the union of yahoo/bing's spam-fighting and DDG's spam fighting. I suspect that of the two, yahoo's has a much bigger impact given the size of the teams involved.

Actually I remove tons of spam from the Yahoo, Bing & other feeds.

What order of magnitude is tons? Not to take away from what you're doing, but historically 90% of new domains are spam.

Re: Giving up on Google

#168

Post by tdfx »

BrandonM wrote: post #164
xentronium wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could as well be searching for: d) A term from the Set theory e) Integer type Too much ambiguity.

Too much ambiguity? http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=cardinal

That link alone just made me switch my search engine to DuckDuckGo.

Re: Giving up on Google

#169

Post by tdfx »

c00ki3s wrote: post #153
thomas11 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Assuming no MITM attack, yes. Of course they can still see what hosts you're connecting to for your HTTPS sessions, just not the content going back and forth.

Re: Giving up on Google

#170

Post by sjs »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #44
sjs wrote: post #38

Giving up on a blog that can't display the article in full without JavaScript. Progressive enhancement folks! (Web apps get a pass, but if your site only needs to display text it should not require JS.)

Thanks for the heads-up. Actually it is designed to gracefully fall back without JavaScript, but there appears to be a display bug I wasn't aware of. I'll fix it soon but right now I have a server down. (BTW, do you have any idea how much extra time you noscript guys add to web development efforts? Ugg.) edit: fixed.

Thanks for catering to us noscript types. I appreciate you taking the time to make it work.

edit: JavaScript the Evil Parts[1] is what made me start using NoScript and NotScripts. The web is safer and less annoying w/ NoScript and FlashBlock.

[1] http://blip.tv/file/3684946

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