13 ms·
Google search takes 7 seconds on certain queries
- d-sc 7y agoTdlr: Googling “Powered by” seems to cause google to take excessive time to return results.
- natrik 7y ago"amex platinum powered by mastercard" as well takes > 5 seconds
- _kbh_ 7y ago"a powered by b" takes >5 seconds "x powered by header" takes >5 seconds "x-powered by header" takes >5 seconds "x-powered-by header" takes ~0.5/0.3 seconds what.
- petra 7y agoThe last one may be from cache.
- _kbh_ 7y agob-cache-busting-powered-by b ~0.4 seconds.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThey're not the same query. They don't return the same results. I seem to recall a dash links words together somehow. So that probably narrows down the search space more.
- tru3_power 7y ago“powered by” a popular term used in a lot of footers for a lot of different web forums/cmses, I wonder if that has something to do with it?
- robjan 7y agoI had the theory that maybe they are trying to filter it out to frustrate searches for vulnerable CMS
- tru3_power 7y agoYea, I was thinking along the same lines. You’ll often see publicly disclosed vulns include google dorks to find vulnerable sites, ex: a google dork to find forums running a vulnerable version of phpbb or something
- tus88 7y ago> x-powered-by header Is that a thing?
- _kbh_ 7y agoYeah, it generally returns some variant of information about the technology that is powering a web application such as ASP.Net or express.
- misterman0 7y agoGoogle doesn‘t use stopwords because if they did I wouldn't be able to search accurately for information regarding the group "The The". But because we can find the occasional slow-running query they might be using "stop phrases" but weren't aware "powered by" should be one.
- londons_explore 7y agoThere is probably a small special index for things like "the the", and then the regular big index filters out such common words.
- xurukefi 7y ago2.64 seconds for me (i guess it's cached now?). Honestly, the mentality in this twitter thread is a joke. Google handles insane amounts of data beyond what 99.99% of engineers have ever dealt with. The fact that their search works at all is a miracle. But I guess people like to ignore that and much rather complain on Twitter that it takes a few seconds to query a database of trillions of records.
- calcifer 7y agoWell, thankfully you were here to defend one of the largest corporations on the planet from these Twitter meanies who dare discuss a slow responding page.
- xurukefi 7y agoI don't see any factual objective discussion in the twitter thread. Btw, I'm not a big fan of Google, which I guess is what you were implying. In fact, I think Google is the most dangerous tech company currently in existence and I consider it a severe threat to our society. But that doesn't mean I cannot objectively judge the technical quality of their products and put things into perspective.
- calcifer 7y ago> I don't see any factual objective discussion in the twitter thread. What do you mean? People are seeing slow queries for "powered by". Unless you think they are lying, I don't see how that isn't factual?
- xurukefi 7y agoIt's not what you say, but how you say it. This is just mindless disproportional bashing. "Come on Google I don't have all day!" "This is actually one of those crazy "facts from the future" to go back in time and tell people 10 years ago: Google has the dominant browser and mobile operating system, but their search sometimes takes 7 seconds." "@Google have you tried implementing these recommendations? https://developers.google.com/speed/" https://developers.google.com/speed/"
- lgeorget 7y agoSince a lot of pages contain these exact words (WordPress, github.io, etc.), maybe it's actually the sorting of the result that takes time?
- louwrentius 7y agoAbout 7.780.000.000 results (4,14 seconds)
- propogandist 7y agoI've found that if you go past page 2x on most of these results, Google just stops presenting pages and will tell you that it's omitted the results. The number of results may represent number of hits in a database, but it's not actually accessible to the end user. After you get into the last few pages, it'll also just cap the result count to the number of pages they've decided to show you.
- lostlogin 7y agoIt’s really weird. If you add “powered by” to a query it’s really slow, but if you add a minor typo (eg “powere by”) it finds the same results, but faster.
- JayXon 7y agoAccording to https://twitter.com/syndk8/status/1157930276208750593 https://twitter.com/syndk8/status/1157930276208750593 > Powered by is a footprint that black hats/hackers and spammers use to find targets. So maybe Google isn't being slow, it's just sleeping intentionally to avoid abuse?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- testplzignore 7y agoIt looks like it is the exact substring that is slow. "asdfpowered byasdf" is slow, too. I bet it's happening at some layer that doesn't even know how to parse the query.
- mehrdadn 7y agoYeah, definitely seen Google take a long time. Also seen weirder things. Just a couple days ago I managed to type a query that neither told me there are no results, nor did it actually return any results. Hadn't seen that before.
- Sendotsh 7y ago> Just a couple days ago I managed to type a query that neither told me there are no results, nor did it actually return any results. Hadn't seen that before. I've had that a few times lately. I thought it was my internet being shoddy but the header and footer load, just no results in the middle nor any error about not finding anything... just blank space.
- andromeduck 7y agoThis is probably a big but I wonder what it would return if all the results for GDPR'ed or otherwise legally censored.
- amelius 7y agoHow many CPUs does Google have at its disposal these days? And how many queries are performed per second?
- H8crilA 7y agoA single query can hit 100s of CPUs. There's over 60k Google search queries per second, according to some random source found on the internet. That would require 600k CPUs. If it's 1000 machines that's being hit it would require 6M CPUs. Also, Internet traffic is bursty, there's maybe 2-3x more queries in peak times. My experience with working at a FAANG: I remember a service that was easily dealing with >10M QPS (albeit much simpler queries than a Google search), or some other services continuously processing (reading/writing to disks) > 100 GB/s. There's A LOT you don't see in FAANG frontends. In particular, the Twitter thread owner suggesting https://developers.google.com/speed/ https://developers.google.com/speed/ has no idea where is the slowness coming from. That being said I'd love to be a Google employee to investigate those queries. Perfect bug reports.
- ec109685 7y agoEach query uses much less than a second’s worth of cpu, so you can’t just multiple searches per second times cpu’s involved in query to get at total cpu’s needed.
- H8crilA 7y agoApparently they don't, look at the posted example :). Seriously though it's probably like half a second or maybe a quarter of a second, that's what Google often reports. And yes this is an oversimplified model. No idea how much CPU is actually used.
- deathwarmedover 7y agoDuckDuckGo make some of these sorts of numbers public: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic https://duckduckgo.com/traffic
- gambiting 7y agoSlightly off topic - has anyone else noticed that in the last couple years Google results have just become....crap? Like, as a programmer I'm used to googling all sorts of things, but lately it's almost useless. Like, my recent fail was searching for "<class name> C# programming" and......the entire first page had both the class name and C# crossed out and was showing me generic results for programming. Top result was some website offering courses in programming. What the shit Google. I personally think it's the rise of devices like Google Home that's to blame - Google tries to reduce every search query into something that can yield a short snippet that can be read back to you - so it's very aggressive towards highly technical queries that it used to be so good at.
- adjkant 7y agoAnecdotally 100% experiencing this almost what feels like daily.
- crummy 7y agoThat's my biggest frustration, when I search for "X Y" and they return me results without "Y" at all, and even call that out in the results. I end up having to put everything in double quotes just to get results that I'd expect.
- mort96 7y ago"I" "miss" "the" "times" "when" "I" "didn't" "have" "to" "type" "like" "this".
- DanBC 7y agoI also find that annoying. I wonder if it started because Google favour "fresh" content, and so people keep changing the content of their pages and Google keeps that page even when Y has been removed. Here's MattCutts from 10 years ago saying this is sometimes useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999#904784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902999#904784 > Your "Red Room" query is hard in a couple ways. First, it looks like that root page used to have the words on the page: "The Red Room Doors open 6pm $18 Pre-Booked" And it's also tough because it looks like the name changed to the "2nd Degree Bar & Grill" at some point. The fact that you can type [red room] and get a suggestion for [red room st. lucia] is actually pretty helpful in my book because it leads you to the answer that the name changed.
- thrwawy3493 7y agoI have that beat, as I once made Google perform a 30-second query. I know exactly how I did it, too. I wasn't sure whether or not it would find it... So how does Google do a query? Well fundamentally it has lists of sites that have a keyword, so it gets the list for each of your keywords, then finds the intersection of those lists, then sorts it by the pagerank of the resulting URL's. That's how it used to work anyway. So back in the day I decided to try to do a test. I got the Gutenberg list of all of Shakespeare's words, and I wrote a program to go through it to find the longest string of all "stop" words (which you could still force Google to include - normally it ignores them, since there are just too many sites that include words like "the" and so on). Stop words are super common words like "the" which would be on millions or billions of pages. A huge list of URL's. So I coded up my little algorithm that goes word by word through the text, keeping track of what the longest string it found so far is, that consisted entirely of stop words. The longest string it found was: "from what it is to a". Just now I again did that query, and on the whole Internet it just found 4 matches (soon it will find this comment too and any archives of this comment), all being the exact phrase from Shakespeare: https://imgur.com/a/lvU1QSs https://imgur.com/a/lvU1QSs Impressively, that query now takes 0.84 seconds (I haven't done that query in several years, it's possibly cached but I doubt it.) However, when I first performed it, it took 30+ seconds. I didn't take a screenshot but I was super impressed. I brought Google to a crawl for 30 seconds, in the exact way I was intending. Moohahahahaha. "Holy cow. I just made Google's databases join six lists each with millions of pages on them, find the intersection, and then go through all of them for which ones had my phrase in literal order. And then it found it." Pretty mind-blowing that today it can do that in < 1 second.
- trilila 7y agoAlso off topic. Google seems to favour "essays" over news, and most times you need to read the history of man kind before you get to relevant content in a news piece. Also it has no means to detect clickbait which is seriously problematic.
- onion2k 7y agoPagerank uses a bunch of things that would favor older pages - more inbound links, more clicks in the search results, and so on. They have "news search" if you just want news: https://news.google.com/ https://news.google.com/
- Yetanfou 7y agoThe "Google News" search can not be seen as an objective search for "news" as it is biased both by the selection and weighting of sources by Google (staff and algorithms) as well as by the search history profile. If you still want to use Google News make sure to access it using a clean browser profile (not logged in, no Google-related cookies) to avoid the search profile contamination which otherwise colour the result. The source selection and weighting bias can not be avoided as that is part and parcel of the way the thing works.
- londons_explore 7y agoI don't think anyone expects Google news to be unbiased? It collates hundreds of sources, many with obvious or subtle bias. If an aggregator puts bias in, they can't provide unbiased out...
- Yetanfou 7y agoWhy not? Google Search started out unbiased, Pagerank (the algorithm) did not care about any opinions or attitudes or leanings and the results ended up being representative of what was out there on the 'net. The same approach could have been used for Google News by pulling in any news source found by Google's crawlers which happened to report on any specific issue, weighing the rank of those sources the same way that regular search results used to be weighed (i.e. those sources which are linked to more often (after filtering out link farms) end up higher than fly-by-night operations which nobody links to. This is not what Google News does though, instead is seems to either use a whitelist or apply a blacklist to produce 'reputable news sources'. It is there the bias starts, in the selection of which sources to link to.
- jmpeax 7y agoGreat, now I'm on a list: https://i.imgur.com/I8FM4aN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/I8FM4aN.jpg
- fxtentacle 7y ago218 seconds? That's apparently a new record.
- fluffything 7y agoDid you report the query? Or why can't you show it?
- alienallys 7y agoQuery was "area 51 goto DevTools and edit"?
- jmpeax 7y agoExactly. My screenshot was a tongue-in-cheek comment on the black bars in the original post. Unless we can reproduce/test it ourselves, then it's as good as a devtools edit.
- noncoml 7y ago“hackernews powered by lisp” seems to be the problem
- stareatgoats 7y agotldr; querying the term "powered by" causes the query to take an inordinate amount of time (still less than 10 seconds, so a far cry from "all day"). The reason doesn't seem clear, but one comment [0] claims that "powered by" is a common query used by black hats and spammers to find targets. Not sure why any "antispam" behind the scenes would cause the query to delay though. Hardcoded delays? [0] https://twitter.com/syndk8/status/1157930276208750593 https://twitter.com/syndk8/status/1157930276208750593
- justaguy500 7y agoThe delays are probably to prevent mass scraping all the 6 350 000 000 results?
- stareatgoats 7y agoFinally found a comment that makes sense actually [0]: "Powered by X" is on millions of web pages because it gets autogen'd by popular web-facing CMS (Joomla, Wordpress etc). So when a search query includes "Powered by" google must determine which among the billion pages with this phrase is most relevant" [0] https://twitter.com/bradcog/status/1158008651619004417 https://twitter.com/bradcog/status/1158008651619004417
- JonathanCreek 7y agoIf you type “google” it will try to find itself, go into infinite loop and crash. Source: Internet
- bubble_talk 7y agoFor everyone who is suggesting Google search quality has taken a hit, I would suggest a quick test to see for yourself that Google is still WAY better than the competitors when it comes to long tail queries. Example: someone compiled a list of things they learned from indiehackers.com interviews. http://www.toomas.net/2017/07/18/reverse-engineering-a-successful-lifestyle-business-heres-everything-ive-learned-from-reading-indiehackers-com/ http://www.toomas.net/2017/07/18/reverse-engineering-a-succe... There are a lot of quotes on that page, and unfortunately none of them are linked back to the original interview. Some quotes are very interesting, so I wanted to find the original interview. I took some of those quotes, put them in double quotation marks, and searched on Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing. By the way, you can only replicate these results by adding the double quotation marks. Results: Google always shows toomas.net in the top results, and almost always finds the relevant interview article on the indiehackers website. DDG (usually) finds the article written on toomas.net, but not the indiehackers interview. Bing often fails to list toomas as the top result, and doesn't find the indiehackers interview at all.
- lol768 7y agoBing seems to simply ignore the quotes in your query after the first result (for query "This idea that you need to water down your pricing or offer a free beta period is bogus") and then just displays random results. Even SoundCloud is listed there..
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoIs saying you are better than Bing and DuckDuckGo saying a lot?
- bubble_talk 7y agoOK, are you suggesting there is a search engine which produces better results for this specific case?
- kuschku 7y agoThe version of Google they had in 2010?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- imdsm 7y agoI posted about this a while ago, where queries took even longer with certain calculations. -2 * 2 takes ~10 secs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470163
- hedora 7y agoI tried to switch from duck duck go to google, but the seven second latencies for certain two word queries got me to switch back after a few days.
- dekhn 7y agoI've heard that numeric range queries make the backends work harder. Consider adding those to your queries to make them slow.
- ysleepy 7y agoI have sympathy with the guys watching the metrics seeing a huge spike in outlier response times and go investigating after this made its round.