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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

#181

Post by dedward »

joebadmo wrote: post #155
surferbayarea wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter? Let's say fb/twitter release a public api to access the social signals. So things like number of likes on a particular news page. In return, is google willing to release the data on number of clicks on a particular search result for all queries? Seems a bit hyp…

Your comment is very confusing to me. If it's a public API, why would Google have to return anything? And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure. It seems like…

twitter and facebook are big enough to complain. they dont need google right now, thay can stand on their own.

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

#182

Post by robotresearcher »

p0ss wrote: post #144
lsb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the perfect time to relaunch "Larry and Sergey won't respect you in the morning." http://ycombinator.com/ad.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482

I love the idea, but there is no way I am moving to the US, especially not to start a tech company, even if you pay me. Silicon valley may have a lot of talent and money, and Y combinator is awesome, but I'd rather not deal with the TSA, the DEA and the DHS. Fascist oligarchies are not conducive to startups.

| Fascist oligarchies are not conducive to startups.*

*except almost all the ones that get talked about here every day.

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

#184

Post by robotresearcher »

Aloisius wrote: post #35
pg wrote: post #3

You don't have to get a job at another company. You could also start your own.

Serious question: have there been any success stories of ex-Googlers starting their own companies? I've been under the impression that the few that have had successful exits were bought by Google itself, mostly as talent acquisitions.

Robot think-tank Willow Garage has a large mindshare with their ROS Open Source robot stack, and is having an appreciable impact in the robot research community. Founder Scott Hassan was a very early Googler and is thus very rich. WG doesn't need to make money in the short term: it's success should be measured in other ways.

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

#185

Post by jrockway »

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…

But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.

I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results.

For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want.

Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.)

Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data.

Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW.

Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more.

I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway.

Matt Cutts wrote a good article about this, BTW: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/

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

#186

Post by falcolas »

Maascamp wrote: post #149
saturdaysaint wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the context, it's not much of a jump. Both the fact that this was said at an event after the "Search Plus Your World Launch" and also the strong emotion implied by "you should probably work somewhere else" indicate that this was mostly about their shift into social.

I would argue that journalists shouldn't be making "jumps" at all. Report and critique the facts not what you think they may imply.

I disagree. I can get the "facts" from Twitter or Reddit or HN. What's missing from those streams, however, is a well thought out intellectual discussion about the facts and what they mean from different points of view.

The OP is a bit light on discussion, however that doesn't mean they should do no discussion whatsoever.

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

#187

Post by dkarl »

6ren wrote: post #165
dkarl wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google is impressing me.

Really? All that to get what I used to get for free? Not to mention that German is just one language, and "translated foreign pages" sounds like it might search the translated text, which is nice, unless it doesn't deliver results in untranslated pages, which leaves me wondering whether Google translates all pages or just some, and whether it's sufficiently integrated with Google Translate to filter out words that can't be translated, which are often exactly the words I want. That puts me right back where I started, sitting in front of Google wondering how the hell it works and what it's filtering out of the internet as a result.

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

#188

Post by nickpresta »

davux wrote: post #127
thought_alarm wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you google it, it's currently the 3rd and 4th search results. Now, if you google SPYW on Bing then it's nowhere to be found, and that's ultimately why I continue to use Google for search regardless of whatever nonsense they put in the side bar.

I just checked on Bing and it's in the description of the second result, from a Jan 13th article. http://www.bing.com/search?q=SPYW > Jan 13, 2012 · Summary: Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) announcement has ruffled some feathers. Both Facebook and Twitter have reacted ... I've been banging the "Bing needs to do so much better to make even a tiny dent" drum for a while now, but they've made strides in the past…

Just to show what I see when I search Bing versus Google: http://i.imgur.com/b3Oig.png

I didn't find a relevant result at all (I searched the first 3 pages - didn't bother going further).

Bing may be improving - I hear Bing Maps is pretty good - but the search is not even close.

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

#189

Post by robrenaud »

waqf wrote: post #141
VikingCoder wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have neither of you heard of verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t... Or turning off Search Plus Your World? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL... No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?

Mostly, I'm able to search what I want but it takes me so many extra clicks that I can tell they don't respect my use cases. For example, if I could I'd set synonym replacement on but turn off assuming I misspelled what I typed. Where's the option for that?

Add &nfpr=1 to your queries to disable full page replacement. You can trick your browser to doing this for you if you use the search bar by setting a custom search engine with that parameter.

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

#190

Post by myko »

flyt wrote: post #100
redthrowaway wrote: post #65

I'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button . Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue. It isn't. Get over it.

I don't understand: one click opt-out is ok for Google but not for Facebook's product launches?

One reason Facebook's opt-out policy has annoyed people in the past is that it is rarely one click - the opt-out is usually buried deep within user settings, and generally users haven't been alerted to the fact that anything has changed to require them to opt-out.
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