4 ms·
Google's search is appalling these days. If I search for three terms, I have to include "each" "of" "them" in quotation marks, or else Google assumes I didn't a
by aynsof 6y ago
Google's search is appalling these days. If I search for three terms, I have to include "each" "of" "them" in quotation marks, or else Google assumes I didn't actually want to search for them.
It's incredibly frustrating when the front door to the internet doesn't actually do the one thing it's supposed to do.
- Ueland 6y agoAnd the amount of spam in search results now is even more appalling. Pintrest + translated content is the first two things that comes to mind.
- ehnto 6y agoGoogle can't even solve the Pinterest image search problem, which has gone on for years. I think they are becoming the incumbent too heavy to move under it's own technology platform, or unwilling to change. Even if you gleefully state that the algorithm finds what users most want, Google is a search product not a technology art installation, and what user's engage with is a function of what you show them in the first place. Pinterest should not be 50%+ of the results for any image search. Pinterest is not the greater internet.
- daniellarusso 6y agoYeah, this is a really bizarre one, in my opinion. Google indexes and provides results for many sites whose content is inaccessible without an account, yet these results take precedent over actual unrestricted content. Similarly with Google News, why are they showing me headlines of articles I am not able to access?
- zpeti 6y agoI'm starting to think over 50% of google's magic is trying to actually get rid of the spam. I think a new search engine would have a very hard time getting through challenges google has already, like link spam, authority domain spam (using medium etc for spammy content), and many many other issues about people manipulating results.
- snowwrestler 6y agoGoogle could go a long way toward improving their search results by just flat out banning the worst offenders, but that is where their size limits their options. If Google banned Pinterest they would likely face an immediate anti-competitive complaint. Google is so big—has such a large market share—that they have to operate pseudo-governmentally, by creating and managing neutral rule sets (or at least what appear to be). It feels to me like there are search opportunities somewhere between Google (the everything engine) and individual site searches (which usually suck). I often get my best results out of Google by using their “site:” operator to target the few sites I know are likely to be useful.
- threeseed 6y agoThis is exactly how Google Ads conflicts with Google Search. Google needs to show you results in order to be able to show ads as much as possible. And so they make it difficult to restrict your query even if that's what you want to do.
- IncRnd 6y agoExactly. A search for test -test used to produce 0 results. One day, that changed into billions of results. This also shows that Google filters their results. test -test produces 4,000,000,000. Yet, jim -jim finds 0 results.
- tester34 6y ago>test -test 0 here
- kkoncevicius 6y ago> test -test About 4,040,000,000 results (0.57 seconds) > jim -jim Your search - jim -jim - did not match any documents.
- tester34 6y agoWhen I changed locales in Google settings from _my_country_ to US, then "test -test" returned 3 890 000 000 results
- IncRnd 6y agoLocale is probably a far more desirable feature than {term -term} producing inconsistent and filtered results. The definition of that type of search used to always be a set size of 0.
- amelius 6y agoSomeone should invent a "grep" for the web.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoIf only there was something that could crawl the web...