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> I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your qu

> I think in part that Google just has gotten a spectacularly confusing failure mode. If it can't find good matching contents, it starts second-guessing your query and producing other results, which makes you think it's not even considering what you entered. This is probably part of it but not the whole explanation: Try to search on Google for: slack ngrok When I and others did earlier today there were a number of pages that contained the words including from the slack.com domain. The top result however was a page that didn't contain ngrok at all. I saw a specialist at another search engine comment that it was because it was a very popular result (at least thats what I read into it). Here's my problem with Google: they are either just really bad at QA or they don't care or they consistently overestimate their dumb AI and underestimate me. I'm fed up. Not including pages that doesn't contain the search terms or anything similar isn't hard when there are multiple good results at the exact same domain / pagerank, is it?

meragrin_ 5y ago
> underestimate me. Given the term "ngrok", I can't say I blame them/it. It looks like a typo to me. I imagine for well over 90% of people searching, it would be a typo. Perhaps, it is a common typo?
- eitland 5y ago
  Well, it is a well known tool for temporary tunneling of http. Google knows and the rest of the results confirm it. Now, if your explanation was the entire explanation it would be kind of ok if they did like Kagi do and Google did themselves at some point, ask nicely: did you mean <something else>? or we included results for <something else>. Please use doublequotes if you want exact matches. Of course with Google this would be pointless as as far as I can see they ignore doublequotes anyway these days...
  - acdha 5y ago
    That’s the key part: a decade ago, that search would have worked perfectly well. They removed the tools for fixing the problem so they own it.
tethys 5y ago
You're probably talking about this site? https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-mentions https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-men... It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/ https://ngrok.com/.
- eitland 5y ago
  So it seems this is an understandable case. Google not only rank but also filter pages based on text of links pointing to them. This has been going on for a while, at one point before Obama, searching for a "a miserable failure" got the White House as first result. But this cannot be the entire explanation for why so many results are useless?

meragrin_ 5y ago

> underestimate me. Given the term "ngrok", I can't say I blame them/it. It looks like a typo to me. I imagine for well over 90% of people searching, it would be a typo. Perhaps, it is a common typo?

eitland 5y ago
Well, it is a well known tool for temporary tunneling of http. Google knows and the rest of the results confirm it. Now, if your explanation was the entire explanation it would be kind of ok if they did like Kagi do and Google did themselves at some point, ask nicely: did you mean <something else>? or we included results for <something else>. Please use doublequotes if you want exact matches. Of course with Google this would be pointless as as far as I can see they ignore doublequotes anyway these days...
- acdha 5y ago
  That’s the key part: a decade ago, that search would have worked perfectly well. They removed the tools for fixing the problem so they own it.

tethys 5y ago

You're probably talking about this site? https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-mentions https://api.slack.com/tutorials/tracks/responding-to-app-men... It is the top result on Bing as well. It probably shows up in this spot on both search engines because it's prominently linked on https://ngrok.com/ https://ngrok.com/.

eitland 5y ago
So it seems this is an understandable case. Google not only rank but also filter pages based on text of links pointing to them. This has been going on for a while, at one point before Obama, searching for a "a miserable failure" got the White House as first result. But this cannot be the entire explanation for why so many results are useless?