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Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

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Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#161

Post by barrkel »

pshc wrote: post #109
danilocampos wrote: post #56

A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do…

Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same.…

I seldom make spelling mistakes. I'd estimate that easily 95% of Google's "suggestions" are incorrect in my use case; and having to put the problematic word in quotes, rather than merely prepending a '+', is an editing chore.

The one thing that annoys me most these days, however, is that it also searches for "bike" when I type "motorbike"; I get endless irrelevant results about cycling in many longer queries. I recall other search engines in the past implementing cluster-based analysis to disambiguate homographs (with user selection on the SERP), but Google still isn't clever enough to fully figure out how "bike" means something different on motorbike-related pages than on cycling-related pages.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#162

Post by esteth »

marshray wrote: post #110
icebraining wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to turn that right off (you can do that, right?) Yes. Settings icon ( ⚙ ), then Search Settings, then Do not use personal results.

What if you don't want to tell them who you are at all? I.e., you block cookies.

They'll still no doubt be using geolocation to filter results, as well as time of day, browser being used, etc...

At their scale, they can no doubt see patterns in data that make it worth personalising search based on those factors, regardless of wether or not you are signed in.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#163

Post by temphn »

danilocampos wrote: post #56

A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do…

The thing is that Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year.

But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating.

Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#164

Post by HerraBRE »

untog wrote: post #150
HerraBRE wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? It sounds like you are defining success or failure solely in terms of whether there is a big-money exit or not. That seems so... sad. What ever happened to "provides employment" and "provides value to its customers"? Anyway, I'm an ex-Googler who started a company after leaving. It's still too early to say whether we'll be "successful" by any metric, but I'm really enjoying it so far, which is enough for…

What ever happened to "provides employment" and "provides value to its customers"? Largely depends, I suspect, on the level of VC involvement. Most (all?) would be looking for a big-money exit in the future- just ticking along nicely means their bet doesn't pay off so well.

Exactly! This is actually why I am in no real hurry to look for VC-type investment. Taking VC money at least appears to eliminate the "middle ground" for the business, one becomes obligated to shoot for big money or go bust trying.

It took me quite a while to come to this conclusion though and I still wonder if I'm missing something obvious. :-)

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#165

Post by 6ren »

dkarl wrote: post #153
6ren wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed both (typos and stems), and am impressed with how accurate it is. I miss literal search, and then they removed +keyword - but fortunately, quotes do it now. For example, rip and "rip" give slightly different results, with different emphasis within them: https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it…

Google's search tweaks are making it better and better for most users. For me, though, I want the old simple-minded Google back. I would rather get what I ask for, even when when it's garbage in/garbage out, than wonder if some heuristic somewhere is filtering out the pages I want to see. For example, I'm sure Google "knows" that I am a monolingual English speaker, but I can read enough German, French, and Spanish to…

> Google Search automatically returns results in the language you choose for Google product text, but you can also request results in many other languages.

Try setting German at "For Google text" (first on language preference page). I did, and got several german hits. Whereas, merely adding "german" for the search results (second on language preferences page) didn't add any. It's a hassle, but a solution is to change your "For Google text" setting. for each language you want.

It seems to me that the vastly greater number of english results would simply out-weigh the german resuls. The german results will still be there, but ranked much lower.

What's curious to me is that you say Google didn't formerly do this. Maybe they changed the weighting of the various languages from being equal to being weighted according to the results.

Probably searching with german terms will get german results, but again a hassle because you have to do it for each language.

EDIT following guelo's comment on "verbatim" under "All Results -> More Search Tools" on the left hand side, there's also a "Translated foreign pages" option. This gave me several results in other languages. Sounds like what you want.

BONUS: I noticed a "Search English and German pages" just under "Search the web" on the left hand side (I added German as a search language above). I think this is precisely what you wanted.

Google is impressing me.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#166

Post by HerraBRE »

Aloisius wrote: post #103
HerraBRE wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? It sounds like you are defining success or failure solely in terms of whether there is a big-money exit or not. That seems so... sad. What ever happened to "provides employment" and "provides value to its customers"? Anyway, I'm an ex-Googler who started a company after leaving. It's still too early to say whether we'll be "successful" by any metric, but I'm really enjoying it so far, which is enough for…

No, it is just that exits are an easy to see measure of success. Any company that is no longer a startup or had significant traction would be a good measure of success as well.

Fair 'nuff. I think the Google Alumni organization tries to keep track of some things like that, but I have no idea how successful they are. I've never bothered telling them what I am up to. :-P

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#167

Post by babblefrog »

danilocampos wrote: post #107
joebadmo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'…

I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me. The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that mean…

You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#168

Post by kaffiene »

Google adds a feature that allows more personal relevancy to searches and now they're evil?

I really don't understand the tech world's tendency towards group-think. First, the cult-like relationship with Apple (and M$ to some degree), then these wails of outrage when Google add a quite innocuous little feature that many people (myself included) will like.

Google are not forcing you to use SPYW, you can turn it off.

Google are not angels. Google are very far from evil. Quit the hyperventilating.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#169

Post by esrauch »

huhtenberg wrote: post #99
lsb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also dates it, in the same way that "Bill and Steve won't respect you in the morning" would make it uniquely a thing of ten years prior. Whereas making it generic makes it more timeless, and timelessness is good design in general.

I assume it's Steve Jobs , not Balmer . (edit) Why am I at -1? Balmer is a more reasonable match for Bill, but he is not a founder. Jobs is a better fit, but it is odd to see him paired with Gates.

It would make no sense at all for Steve Jobs in the pre-iPod era.

Re: Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else

#170

Post by guelo »

6ren wrote: post #137
pshc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same.…

I've noticed both (typos and stems), and am impressed with how accurate it is. I miss literal search, and then they removed +keyword - but fortunately, quotes do it now. For example, rip and "rip" give slightly different results, with different emphasis within them: https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it…

> Technically precise searches aren't their main goal (though I wish they retained it somewhere).

There is the 'Verbatim' search option hidden on the SERP page on the left hand side under All Results -> More Search Tools -> Verbatim

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