3 ms·

I no longer find interesting things in the top results like 10 years ago. Some search terms only return about 100 results when there should be many more. Acade

by xyN10 8y ago

I no longer find interesting things in the top results like 10 years ago. Some search terms only return about 100 results when there should be many more. Academic websites seem to have nearly vanished from the results. Perhaps the results get better if you pay Google by allowing them cookies, but I think that wasn't necessary 10 years ago either. So the difference is that in a non-biased library you find many more and interesting sources.

onemoresoop 8y ago
Google has an interest into generally narrowing your results so it's easier to shove you through their hoops (advertisers, etc) and this behavior is becoming more common and a frustrating experience for me as well.
- cr0sh 8y ago
  One thing I hate a lot about Google - and I am not sure why they do it - I can't even sum it up in a word or sentence. Basically you search for something, and it returns (supposedly) 10,000 matches, and 100 pages to go thru (or whatnot). You look at the first page, check a few, then move to the second page. Suddenly, the number of pages drops in half or more. Within a few more pages, things narrow down to 5 pages or less, with the last page having only 2-3 links. I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more. They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END). One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure). It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up). Meh...
huffmsa 8y ago
Or when the first result says > "missing {keyword}, require {keyword}?" Great job big G, I'm definitely the one who made the mistake with my query and didn't want to include that word.
- icebraining 8y ago
  You haven't, but many people do; they include extraneous words, or write overly precise queries (like including specific their specific laptop model number, which only sells in our small country, rather than a general model name), then get frustrated they can't find anything.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    What are the guys at Google getting paid for other than building a system which can intelligently apply those exclusion filters? My two word query should not have one of it's words excluded. OR If the typical user is asking conversational questions, the search models need a layer of NLP preprocessing, which should likewise be conditional.
icebraining 8y ago
My point is that there's no such thing as a non-biased library. You always see things under some influence of the process you used to find them. It's fine to prefer other sources than Google, but it's not "insane" to use Google because it will do something that is inescapable anyway.

by xyN10 8y ago

onemoresoop 8y ago

Google has an interest into generally narrowing your results so it's easier to shove you through their hoops (advertisers, etc) and this behavior is becoming more common and a frustrating experience for me as well.

cr0sh 8y ago
One thing I hate a lot about Google - and I am not sure why they do it - I can't even sum it up in a word or sentence. Basically you search for something, and it returns (supposedly) 10,000 matches, and 100 pages to go thru (or whatnot). You look at the first page, check a few, then move to the second page. Suddenly, the number of pages drops in half or more. Within a few more pages, things narrow down to 5 pages or less, with the last page having only 2-3 links. I don't understand this "narrowing". I want to see every single damn result, I want to go to the "last page" and see those weird and obscure results. But nope, not any more. They do a similar thing with image search; you search for something that you know has tens of thousands of images (ie - cats), but you are limited to maybe a total of 1000 or fewer images (show more results...show more results...END). One last thing that occurs - and I am not sure how this is done; I don't think it is google - but how is it that I can do a lookup for something, and then in google's search results there will be exact matches for that something being searched for, but if you go to those links, invariably they forward you to some kind of spammy or worse "content" (usually doing nothing for me, because they assume everyone is using Windows - so they drop a link for a file that's an executable .EXE - yeah, sure). It is almost like sites are (somehow) generating search results on the fly for google based on your keywords, but that can't be possible (?) because that isn't how google does indexing (that wouldn't even work or be efficient). So I don't know how it is that sites have my exact keyword matches (unless due to sheer numbers, my searches aren't that unique - but I do often search for very obscure stuff, and even those things pop up). Meh...

huffmsa 8y ago

Or when the first result says > "missing {keyword}, require {keyword}?" Great job big G, I'm definitely the one who made the mistake with my query and didn't want to include that word.

icebraining 8y ago
You haven't, but many people do; they include extraneous words, or write overly precise queries (like including specific their specific laptop model number, which only sells in our small country, rather than a general model name), then get frustrated they can't find anything.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  What are the guys at Google getting paid for other than building a system which can intelligently apply those exclusion filters? My two word query should not have one of it's words excluded. OR If the typical user is asking conversational questions, the search models need a layer of NLP preprocessing, which should likewise be conditional.

icebraining 8y ago

My point is that there's no such thing as a non-biased library. You always see things under some influence of the process you used to find them. It's fine to prefer other sources than Google, but it's not "insane" to use Google because it will do something that is inescapable anyway.