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Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on t

Wow. So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive. Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year is great, and I was totally unaware of it. I'll update my post shortly with a note about that. Having something like that sticking right out on the left-hand side would be even better. :-) I think I often see people complaining about search quality (here, and in the other HN thread I linked to from about a year back, as examples), but if you ask them about the specifics of the search, they don't remember. I think that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. Although it's at least partly laziness on the user's part, I think Google could view this as a huge amount of potentially beneficial information that they're missing out on. Trying to improve search results without knowing what problems people are having with them is challenging, at least. It would be nifty if there were some kind of "these were not the search results I was looking for" quick form linked from certain types of search results.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago
People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?" I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.
- eitland 16y ago
  I wonder if it would help to give some feedback to the ones that you actually took into account? I think I've tried more than a couple of times to give some feedback about the search results. Seeing that nothing happened, and getting nothing but an automated response, I've stopped doing that. Reporting flashing ads to the ad team worked better, they were removed later the same day.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    One of the problems with replying to every piece of feedback is that a link on Google's search page--even a link that many people don't notice--gets a huge volume of feedback. And the resulting feedback can be pretty unhelpful ("I lost my cat. I think you should build a search for lost cats.") So we don't have the resources to reply to all of those. Personally, I would like if we offered a lower-volume feedback method with a higher hit rate of good feedback. Hacker News is acting as the prequalifier in this instance, but I find that people annoyed enough to blog often provide good feedback too. Overall I agree with you, but even if we had that channel, many times the feedback would be: "Yup, that's a bad set of search results. We'll try to come up with a way to make it better, but it might be a while. Getting an algorithm to do better on this search will be hard."
- kingsley_20 16y ago
  Why not ask permission to transmit the last few searches and a snapshot of the results. I mean, I usually only hit "give feedback" when i'm not finding the stuff I want. You'll probably be able to discern a lot from that.
  - Matt_Cutts 16y ago
    The "give feedback" form does automatically populate the feedback form with what you were searching for when you clicked to give feedback. We haven't tried transmitting several searches because people would probably complain, and it's not clear how much previous searches would help. But when we revamped the feedback form, that's one of the big wins we got from making it dynamic instead of a generic form.

Matt_Cutts 16y ago

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better. We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?" I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.

eitland 16y ago
I wonder if it would help to give some feedback to the ones that you actually took into account? I think I've tried more than a couple of times to give some feedback about the search results. Seeing that nothing happened, and getting nothing but an automated response, I've stopped doing that. Reporting flashing ads to the ad team worked better, they were removed later the same day.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  One of the problems with replying to every piece of feedback is that a link on Google's search page--even a link that many people don't notice--gets a huge volume of feedback. And the resulting feedback can be pretty unhelpful ("I lost my cat. I think you should build a search for lost cats.") So we don't have the resources to reply to all of those. Personally, I would like if we offered a lower-volume feedback method with a higher hit rate of good feedback. Hacker News is acting as the prequalifier in this instance, but I find that people annoyed enough to blog often provide good feedback too. Overall I agree with you, but even if we had that channel, many times the feedback would be: "Yup, that's a bad set of search results. We'll try to come up with a way to make it better, but it might be a while. Getting an algorithm to do better on this search will be hard."
kingsley_20 16y ago
Why not ask permission to transmit the last few searches and a snapshot of the results. I mean, I usually only hit "give feedback" when i'm not finding the stuff I want. You'll probably be able to discern a lot from that.
- Matt_Cutts 16y ago
  The "give feedback" form does automatically populate the feedback form with what you were searching for when you clicked to give feedback. We haven't tried transmitting several searches because people would probably complain, and it's not clear how much previous searches would help. But when we revamped the feedback form, that's one of the big wins we got from making it dynamic instead of a generic form.