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There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat https://www.goo

There are lots of problems with Google search results recently, this is one I noticed today: https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not about how to arrange my junk in a particular way.

roymurdock 11y ago
You got unlucky. G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) is really popular slang at the moment for describing athletes, fashion, actors, etc. and people are undoubtedly searching for that term more than they are looking for the wikipedia page for the animal.
- nkurz 11y ago
  I presume that Rob would have been OK with "greatest of all time", which indeed is the top result once you click on the link. The problem is that the highlighted snippet on the Google page is significantly "racier": Urban Dictionary: goat www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goat Urban Dictionary Tucking back your balls and dick, then bending over thus resembling the back of a goat...according to the rules of the game, the person who looks gets 4 kicks in ...
Lagged2Death 11y ago
I get Wikipedia as the top result. Maybe Google is making a guess about your preference based on your history? Try the search in incognito/private mode and see.
- nkurz 11y ago
  I just tried with Incognito, and got Urban Dictionary as the top result: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goat So maybe it's based on location? Ranked higher based on browser, IP, or something else?
  - Lagged2Death 11y ago
    I was using a mobile browser before, and the page layout was different, putting the big summary box full of photos (which excerpts and links to Wikipedia) at the top. On a desktop, I see what you mean; UrbanDictionary is indeed at the top of the plain-text search results. Not going to defend Google at all. But for myself, if I'm looking for a Wikipedia-grade introduction to some topic, I usually just search Wikipedia directly. Wikipedia has become so ridiculously useful that it is the top result of a Google search half the time anyway. Wikipedia is a better human-curated web index than any of the old-school 1990s human-curated web indexes ever were.
neves 11y ago
Google revolutionary approach to indexing the web was that it started to use the amount of hyperlinks to a page as a measure of its importance. Since then, they have a strong "internet bias". If something is more present in the internet than in the "real" world, it would appear first. Searching for "Apple" used to display just pages about the company, not the fruit (even when the company was almost out of business). Searching for "samba" would display just pages about mounting windows filesystems in Linux, not the most important musical genre of a whole country. Nowadays they improved their algorithms and this bias isn't so strong, but it always important to remember that what is important in the cyberspace isn't necessary important for the whole world.
dheera 11y ago
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.com/#q=tsla https://www.google.com/#q=tsla I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product?
- Consultant32452 11y ago
  I just went there and the first "result" is a giant stock chart widget showing the 1-day chart with the options of viewing 5-day, month, etc. This chart takes up a full 1/3 of the vertical screen size. At the bottom of the chart there's 3 quick-links to: Google Finance, Yahoo finance, and MSN Money. The next result-ish thing is Google's "In the News" section that has an article about the broken Gigafactory promises. The first real result is yahoo finance, just as it is for you. I suspect it isn't so much that Google is promoting Yahoo over its own product, since that first chart is clearly a Google product, but that it doesn't bias the real search results in their favor. It's a legitimate organic search result. Most people probably just want the stock price from the first/simplest way possible, which is provided or they want the yahoo finance page.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  > I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results I need, so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model for the exact reason you gave as a defense. edit: If disagreement could be verbalized it would be super helpful to me. I have been thinking about this issue a lot, and often I see people say the same thing as me: * single website controls almost 100% of english language results * limiting of images/video from results * incorrect/wrong results * limited respect for boolean and quotation operators * high ranking sites are not authoritative, e.g. w3schools, wordpress automated blogs. * no way to filter at all But then down vote my conclusion: > searches could be filtered and parameters set by user. Really would be useful to understand my logic error, or if I have missed something.
solveforall 11y ago
To be fair, when I search I get a huge Knowledge Graph result on the right with a picture of the animal. Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this. What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings Unfortunately, it's not there right now.

roymurdock 11y ago

You got unlucky. G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) is really popular slang at the moment for describing athletes, fashion, actors, etc. and people are undoubtedly searching for that term more than they are looking for the wikipedia page for the animal.

nkurz 11y ago
I presume that Rob would have been OK with "greatest of all time", which indeed is the top result once you click on the link. The problem is that the highlighted snippet on the Google page is significantly "racier": Urban Dictionary: goat www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goat Urban Dictionary Tucking back your balls and dick, then bending over thus resembling the back of a goat...according to the rules of the game, the person who looks gets 4 kicks in ...

Lagged2Death 11y ago

I get Wikipedia as the top result. Maybe Google is making a guess about your preference based on your history? Try the search in incognito/private mode and see.

nkurz 11y ago
I just tried with Incognito, and got Urban Dictionary as the top result: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=goat So maybe it's based on location? Ranked higher based on browser, IP, or something else?
- Lagged2Death 11y ago
  I was using a mobile browser before, and the page layout was different, putting the big summary box full of photos (which excerpts and links to Wikipedia) at the top. On a desktop, I see what you mean; UrbanDictionary is indeed at the top of the plain-text search results. Not going to defend Google at all. But for myself, if I'm looking for a Wikipedia-grade introduction to some topic, I usually just search Wikipedia directly. Wikipedia has become so ridiculously useful that it is the top result of a Google search half the time anyway. Wikipedia is a better human-curated web index than any of the old-school 1990s human-curated web indexes ever were.

neves 11y ago

Google revolutionary approach to indexing the web was that it started to use the amount of hyperlinks to a page as a measure of its importance. Since then, they have a strong "internet bias". If something is more present in the internet than in the "real" world, it would appear first. Searching for "Apple" used to display just pages about the company, not the fruit (even when the company was almost out of business). Searching for "samba" would display just pages about mounting windows filesystems in Linux, not the most important musical genre of a whole country. Nowadays they improved their algorithms and this bias isn't so strong, but it always important to remember that what is important in the cyberspace isn't necessary important for the whole world.

dheera 11y ago

I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up. However, there's a particularly interesting case: https://www.google.com/#q=tsla https://www.google.com/#q=tsla I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product?

Consultant32452 11y ago
I just went there and the first "result" is a giant stock chart widget showing the 1-day chart with the options of viewing 5-day, month, etc. This chart takes up a full 1/3 of the vertical screen size. At the bottom of the chart there's 3 quick-links to: Google Finance, Yahoo finance, and MSN Money. The next result-ish thing is Google's "In the News" section that has an article about the broken Gigafactory promises. The first real result is yahoo finance, just as it is for you. I suspect it isn't so much that Google is promoting Yahoo over its own product, since that first chart is clearly a Google product, but that it doesn't bias the real search results in their favor. It's a legitimate organic search result. Most people probably just want the stock price from the first/simplest way possible, which is provided or they want the yahoo finance page.
vonklaus 11y ago
> I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. This is the problem. Search isn't a democracy. I lookup the results I need, so not giving me filtering ability makes no sense. An engine that does what google does is an amazing achievement, but no longer makes sense as a model for the exact reason you gave as a defense. edit: If disagreement could be verbalized it would be super helpful to me. I have been thinking about this issue a lot, and often I see people say the same thing as me: * single website controls almost 100% of english language results * limiting of images/video from results * incorrect/wrong results * limited respect for boolean and quotation operators * high ranking sites are not authoritative, e.g. w3schools, wordpress automated blogs. * no way to filter at all But then down vote my conclusion: > searches could be filtered and parameters set by user. Really would be useful to understand my logic error, or if I have missed something.

solveforall 11y ago

To be fair, when I search I get a huge Knowledge Graph result on the right with a picture of the animal. Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this. What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings Unfortunately, it's not there right now.