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I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half. At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it
by danilocampos 16y ago
I am often annoyed by Google. Its word clustering is too clever by half.
At one point I was debugging, I think, an NSTableView object. Google says "eh, fuck it, iPhone dev is much more popular, here's UITableView. Have fun with that."
And so then I have to wrap NSTableView in quotes to force Google to use my input as I've provided it.
I wish I could turn this kind of stuff off.
- studer 16y agoHmm. I just searched for it. 46,100 hits. Not a UITableView within sight. Are you sure you didn't mistype? If I type in USTableView, it shows me two UITableView hits at the top, before the exact matches.
- danilocampos 16y agoIt was a specific phrase where it did this, because I tried again with just NSTableView and it was cool. I wish I could remember what was giving me trouble so I could search for it again.
- pragmatic 16y agoCheck your search history: http://www.google.com/history/ http://www.google.com/history/
- danilocampos 16y agoSearch history is one of Google's creepier features – I disabled it awhile ago. Not that I suspect it helps anything, but at least if someone finds my computer or something, that data isn't two clicks away.
- gaius 16y agoIt's creepier than you think - ever since it began making suggestions, long before Google Instant, Google has been quietly logging things you didn't search for.
- EricBurnett 16y agoFYI, search history is one of the parts of the account you have to put your password in again to view. So it should be safe from prying eyes.
- jacquesm 16y agoPrying eyes on your side of the connection you mean.
- moultano 16y agohttps://www.google.com/
- jacquesm 16y agoWhich terminates on the other side where everything is plaintext again. https is a transport level protocol, so it protects you from people (trivially) snooping on your data in transit but anybody at google with enough clearance has access to that data.
- moultano 16y agoIf that's what you are worried about then it seems like you'd have trouble using the internet in general.
- jacquesm 16y agoI'm not worried, it's just that the gggp of this comment mentioned that search history is protected by a password and so it 'should be safe from prying eyes.' All I did was point out that that data is stored on a server somewhere else and that there are lots of eyes that could be prying there. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that are concerned about their internet use being monitored, for instance, dissidents and other people that have legitimate reasons to be afraid of having their search history lifted in the future. Interesting reading on the subject of subpoenas of search records: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165854 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5165854 The less information that is being held on you by third parties the less chance that one day you'll be part of some drag-net operation.
- jackowayed 16y agoThey should add some kind of "I mean this word and only this word" symbol. Maybe backslash, since it's sort of like you're escaping the word. So in your case, you'd change "NSTableView" to "\NSTableView" and it would work.
- danilocampos 16y agoIn fairness, they have that already. If you wrap a word/phrase with quotes, they'll not screw around with their fancy word clustering.
- arohner 16y agoNot really. I've had this break for me all the time when searching for programming terms. Proof: Google for "what we have here is failure to communicate" http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22what+we+have+here+is+a+failure+to+communicate%22#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=%22what+we+have+here+is+failure+to+communicate%22&aq=f&aqi=g1g-c1g2g-o1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=6052204b889acdd8 http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... The first hit is the wiki article on the quote (good), but the exact search string is not present on the page.
- danilocampos 16y agoNo kidding! I thought that the quotes made the term inviolable. I wonder if this is new. A big issue with Google is that, behind the scenes, things change without any outward guidance to longterm users on how to adjust.
- wccrawford 16y agoIt's not new. And + doesn't mean required any more, either. It's treated as increased importance, but not required. I've been complaining about these changes for years.
- studer 16y agoClick "cached", and you get the explanation: "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: what we have here is failure to communicate"
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- petercooper 16y agoI can't think of any good examples now, but in some IDEs in the 80s and 90s they had an "expert mode" you could toggle on and off to extend the number of menu options and the like. A similar setting on Google would be great. I know a little of Google's syntax like the + and " workarounds, but having a literal search as default would be worthwhile for many users. I recall that I switched to Altavista back in the mid 90s because it offered a feature like that.
- gaius 16y agoHere's one: I often google for Oracle and Python. I sometimes get articles about Apollo, Pythia and Delphi.
- danilocampos 16y agoFrom your mouth to Marissa Meyer's ears. My ultimate Google fantasy: An account setting called "2008 mode." No instant search. No fancy, annoying endless scroll Google image search. No word clustering/auto-substitution. It would be awesome.
- yellowbkpk 16y agoI wonder if part of Google's speed increases involve dropping some of the more complex keywords while creating the index so that the search space is smaller.
- jacquesm 16y agoNot that I can detect. For instance: หาเมนบอร์ดช๊อคเกต775 returns 42k results, and is not exactly a common combination of words on google.com. Extra points if you know what it stands for :)
- sans-serif 16y agoHere to claim my extra points. Btw, tried searching for Gmail messages in Thai before? It doesn't work.
- dRother 16y agoI, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.
- thomas11 16y agoThis would make sense for the crowd here, but not for 90% of users whose searches are very fuzzy. So, another vote for "expert mode"...
- dRother 16y agoI think anyone might find it confusing when they search for something specific and their words are automatically changed - except for spelling fixes.
- daveungerer 16y agoHad a similar problem when googling ruby 1.9.2 slow snow leopard, since that describes the problem I had. There was no auto-correct, but somehow they decided to highlight the word low in the search results (which may or may not mean that the rankings were screwed as well). I guess slow is just the plural of low. Because of the s, you know. I mean, seriously, if there aren't enough relevant results with the word slow in them, why include a completely unrelated word?