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25 Things I Hate About Google

searchengineland.com

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#3
Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query, but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#4
post #3

Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query, but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)

This is a revisit of five-year old gripes; Google didn't do that five years ago.

But yes, it's annoying.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#7
post #6

What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these flaws?

Assumptions. Engineers are confident that building a search engine requires thousands of servers, indexing the entire web, coming up with some super complex algorithm etc...

Maybe we need a couple of guys who do not know their limitations and are ready to approach search from a different angle.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#8
post #3

Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query, but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)

I actually like that feature. I generally tend to know how my search queries sound but not how they are spelled, so this gets me to where I want to go faster. I imagine this is also true for a large number of people, so I doubt it would be changed.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#9
>Google still does plenty of testing. And we still get messages from people who wonder if they’ve been hit by malware. But it feels like this is happening less. Ideally, the company would regularly advise people of when a test is underway.

Have they not heard of "New Coke"? Constant, minor flux is accepted much more readily than periods of non-change followed by a big change.

Re: 25 Things I Hate About Google

#10
Point #1 annoys me a lot. It would be possible to perform many interesting analyses on your own (think Venn diagrams, association graphs on natural language) if the numbers were accurate. But they are not.

I actually heard first-hand from a Google employee an explanation for why these numbers are like that. She said something like, "they are only estimates." Well the point is, if these estimates are as inaccurate as they are, why put them up at all? Doing so is almost dishonest-like.

I almost have a feeling (warning: getting into conspiracy territory here) that the search recall numbers are inaccurate on purpose, so that no third-party analytics could be built using them.

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