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Things I've learned at Google so far

bentilly.blogspot.com

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Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#191

Post by GFischer »

nostrademons wrote: post #146
spitfire wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

webspam. Search for 1935 buick and get back dozens of sites that have "OEM fuel injectors for your 1935 buick" or "OEM stereo for your 1935 buick", etc, etc. Google has let their core brand go bad.

When I just searched for [1935 buick], the results looked pretty good. The first hit was for the Old Car Manual Project, the second was for HowStuffWorks, the third was "1935 Buick Series 40 Images, Information, and History". I didn't see any OEM links. When you do find a lot of spam, does Show Options -> Fewer Shopping Sites help?

I didn't realize that the Show Options -> Fewer Shopping Sites existed :) Thanks

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#192

Post by _delirium »

_delirium wrote: post #183
nostrademons wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the tasks you've had a bad experience with? I work in Google Search, and we actively try to identify areas that people are having difficulty with and then come up with ways to make their search experience better. Unfortunately, most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. If we knew precisely where the pain points were, we'd be much better able to solve them.

One big annoyance: 10 years ago, when I searched for a snippet of song lyrics, I got a fan site for the band that accurately transcribed the lyrics. Now I get nothing but pages and pages of shady sites selling me ringtones, with inaccurate lyrics, even when I know there are fansites for the band with better lyrics. A guess is that this is the result of the reliance on domain names for ranking. The high-quality lyrics…

As a bit of a followup: an even worse case (i.e. less likely to get a nice, fan-created lyrics page as one of the first-page hits) is when I know the name of the song and google for something like: joy division warsaw lyrics.

Expected result is something like: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/warsaw.html

What I actually get are a bunch of sites with names like mp3lyrics, songlyrics, musicsonglyrics. It might be that the word "lyrics" in my query is boosting that sort of stuff to the top? From what I can tell, Google also penalizes old / rarely updated sites, which probably hurts these kinds of pages--- the page linked above was last updated in 2007, but it's still the best result for that query.

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#193

Post by bluishgreen »

petercooper wrote: post #13

Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at Google a humbling experience. This is absolutely true. It took me less than a day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I am [..] without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured). This strikes me as a proble…

"don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic)"

Meaning dyslexic people are stupid, which among other things that Edison and Einstein were stupid. Nice.

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#194

Post by petercooper »

bluishgreen wrote: post #193
petercooper wrote: post #13

Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at Google a humbling experience. This is absolutely true. It took me less than a day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I am [..] without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be measured). This strikes me as a proble…

"don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic)" Meaning dyslexic people are stupid, which among other things that Edison and Einstein were stupid. Nice.

No, not meaning that at all. Claiming anyone not in the top 1% is "stupid" is ridiculous. A lack of indexable intelligence and "stupidity" might correlate, but are not linked. "Smarts" != intelligence.

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#195

Post by moultano »

brown9-2 wrote: post #127
waterlesscloud wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they're #1 just means they're the best of the available options. It doesn't mean the experience is great, just better than what else is out there.

Then what is stopping someone from designing a better experience?

It's hard?

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#196

Post by elblanco »

btilly wrote: post #181
elblanco wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick, slightly off-topic question. There's a belief in the industry (I think wrongly) that pretty much the only way to build big complex systems, you need a central "Enterprise Architect" to model all the business processes and use those to drive down to the technology. As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular iso…

Excellent question. I don't think I'm supposed to answer it. However Google's answer would be part of the, "nobody would believe me" piece of neilk's top-rated comment.

Thanks for entertaining it. Your answer is already pretty informative.

Re: Things I've learned at Google so far

#197

Post by lispm »

codexon wrote: post #142
simonk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paranoid a little? It was most likely downvoted because it has nothing to do with the article and was see as trolling.

It is marginally related to the article, both being about Google. It isn't fair to say that he was trolling just because half of his comment wasn't discussed in the blog post.

my point is that these people who think their are intelligent, in fact are missing lots of facets from what we call 'intelligence'. From my point of view Google's employees are understanding a lot about technology and little about its social impact. It would help if they would not present them as super smart and act so clueless in so many ways.
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