33 ms·

Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches

86 points by topcat31 15y ago

ploxination 15y ago
Hopefully I will no longer see outdated tech articles from last month when googling the future! It is a terrible feeling as you finish a tutorial and see that it was written in 2003.
chrisguitarguy 15y ago
The real question: does it matter who "breaks" a story first? Will the folks who got the story first get to the top of the "fresh" pile even though their story may be a day older? Or does the most recent content always win?
guimarin 15y ago
color me unimpressed that they're now able to sort their livecrawl with a 'date' flag. And this seems to simply be a case of firing that filter automatically for 35% of their searches.
s00pcan 15y ago
I constantly search for results within the past year to find information that's actually recent and current instead of "how to do x, circa 200X"
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  I do the same thing. I use the left-sidebar time range selection and set it to "past year" for about 50% of my searches.
  - agumonkey 15y ago
    So much that I wish it was visible by default, or even more central. So many times the top results are very high references of outdated things.
natesm 15y ago
Has anyone else noticed Google making a lot of autocorrection mistakes recently? I don't mind the traditional "did you mean" links, but I've been getting redirected to pages for different queries, with a "did you mean [what you actually typed]" link. It's especially a problem with programming because a lot of words that are "wrong" are actually acronyms or strange library names.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Yes, all the time. I pretty much never expect Google to search for what I asked the first time around now.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  Yes. It is incredibly frustrating. There's a fine line between being helpful and taking control from the user. Google used to be safely on the helpful side of the line. Now more and more SERPs are wasting my time by making me refine my search with qualifiers to ensure I actually get what I want.
- blhack 15y ago
  I think that google is losing sight of what made them popular to begin with. [within reason] Every workshop on the planet has a hammer in it. This is because hammers are very simple, they never break, they never behave unexpectedly, they're highly useful, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do as perfectly as anybody can imagine. Hammers are the perfect tools; something that should have been idolized in Brave New World. Google was a hammer for a long time. It wasn't even a question that google would be the default search engine for everybody who knew anything about anything. Google did search really well, behaved exactly as advertised, rarely broke. It was perfect. It was a hammer. It feels like google (overall, I don't just mean search) is losing their grasp on this. Stuff like charts API. Maybe it's just me, but the new version of this is annoying. It's some javascripty nonsense that feels complicated. It's a laser-guided, nuclear-powered gryoscopically stabilized, diamond-tipped screwdriver that can also make coffee and fold your laundry. You could build a submarine with it. But it's also got an instruction manual that is a foot thick. The old api was just: <img src='https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc&#62 https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc> or something similar. And now I can't +term, they took away the links to "cached" versions of the pages, things autocomplete (incorrectly), it assumes I meant something that I didn't, it wants to integrate into a social network, etc. etc. Google...you're starting to feel a little microsofty. Are you okay?
untog 15y ago
I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance: If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far. As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?
- jsnell 15y ago
  > I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous, but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok. The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.
jellicle 15y ago
This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand. I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages. I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.
- frankydp 15y ago
  I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in which "freshness" would not improve quality. Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley Effect" or new is always better. IMO. The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this specific change is overly relevant.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
nextparadigms 15y ago
What I dislike the most from recent updates is the preview feature. I find it completely gets in my way, and it's very easy to unintentionally make it preview something, when I just want to scan the results. Does anyone else find that feature useful?
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  I never understood the usefulness of the preview feature. The only time I find it marginally interesting is when a website is currently down or had recently been taken offline. Though, I find the "cache:" query more useful in those cases anyway. The preview window does pop-up unexpectedly for me as well. I guess my mouse pointer wanders over to the right side of the search result every once in a while, triggering the preview.
  - brc 15y ago
    I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone understood it, now it's gone. Boo.
    - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
      The cached link is still there. Look for it on the page preview.
      - brc 15y ago
        Can't we just have it back where it was?
- wahnfrieden 15y ago
  I don't at all, and find it incredibly distracting to have movement on the entire right half o the page when I'm just trying to scan the search result text.
- 15y ago
danilocampos 15y ago
I hope this works. Searches for error messages and the like are often cluttered with results from 2009 or earlier, describing troubleshooting steps that are out of date or unnecessary. At this point I add the current year to the end of any given troubleshooting search – and even that isn't always enough.
- jontas 15y ago
  I run into this problem all the time. I usually hit the "More search tools" link and then limit my search to the past year or so (depending on the issue). Also including specific version numbers helps as well.. but maybe this update will make those techniques irrelevant.
pavel 15y ago
Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page, now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one else experience a degradation in the quality of results?
- jakeonthemove 15y ago
  Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if I'm logged out of my Google account...
  - fred_nada 15y ago
    Yes, i noticed better results outside of personalized search... It is a hassle to logout thought. I actually use bing for 90% of searches... google is better at tech searches like mysql questions, but outside of that there results have gotten more irrelevant and crowded with useless content...
simon_weber 15y ago
Glad this is here; I really liked Google realtime when it was around.
thaumaturgy 15y ago
Since I never seem to miss a chance to criticize Google: Thank you, Google. This should make your search results much more helpful.
sant0sk1 15y ago
This is a much welcomed change. I find that I quite often want recency based searches and blogged a quick solution if you're using Chrome: http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recency-based-google-searches-in-chrome/ http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recen...
JonnieCache 15y ago
Hopefully this will help out the perl crew and their problem with stale tutorials. The leeds doc is still top result, but hopefully this will make it easier for them to push new stuff up there.
jakeonthemove 15y ago
I hope they thought everything through, because there are a lot of cases where old content is just as good or even better - there are a lot of "timeless" articles and video out there. However, when it comes to software/tech/anything fast moving, I'd really like to see the latest results first. I'm tired of searching for "how to set psa-proftpd to standalone in plesk" (just a quick example off the top of my head) and get 5 year old results that have long since stopped being relevant...
cbr 15y ago
Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the early 1990s): https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial
jakeonthemove 15y ago
They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...
3pt14159 15y ago
I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.
suivix 15y ago
It's amusing how the megacorp Google uses the Occupy protests as the main example of their search changes.
kkihara 15y ago
The real question is, do we have an alternative?

86 points by topcat31 15y ago

Hopefully I will no longer see outdated tech articles from last month when googling the future! It is a terrible feeling as you finish a tutorial and see that it was written in 2003.

chrisguitarguy 15y ago

The real question: does it matter who "breaks" a story first? Will the folks who got the story first get to the top of the "fresh" pile even though their story may be a day older? Or does the most recent content always win?

guimarin 15y ago

color me unimpressed that they're now able to sort their livecrawl with a 'date' flag. And this seems to simply be a case of firing that filter automatically for 35% of their searches.

s00pcan 15y ago

I constantly search for results within the past year to find information that's actually recent and current instead of "how to do x, circa 200X"

epoxyhockey 15y ago
I do the same thing. I use the left-sidebar time range selection and set it to "past year" for about 50% of my searches.
- agumonkey 15y ago
  So much that I wish it was visible by default, or even more central. So many times the top results are very high references of outdated things.

natesm 15y ago

Has anyone else noticed Google making a lot of autocorrection mistakes recently? I don't mind the traditional "did you mean" links, but I've been getting redirected to pages for different queries, with a "did you mean [what you actually typed]" link. It's especially a problem with programming because a lot of words that are "wrong" are actually acronyms or strange library names.

dangrossman 15y ago
Yes, all the time. I pretty much never expect Google to search for what I asked the first time around now.
danilocampos 15y ago
Yes. It is incredibly frustrating. There's a fine line between being helpful and taking control from the user. Google used to be safely on the helpful side of the line. Now more and more SERPs are wasting my time by making me refine my search with qualifiers to ensure I actually get what I want.
blhack 15y ago
I think that google is losing sight of what made them popular to begin with. [within reason] Every workshop on the planet has a hammer in it. This is because hammers are very simple, they never break, they never behave unexpectedly, they're highly useful, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do as perfectly as anybody can imagine. Hammers are the perfect tools; something that should have been idolized in Brave New World. Google was a hammer for a long time. It wasn't even a question that google would be the default search engine for everybody who knew anything about anything. Google did search really well, behaved exactly as advertised, rarely broke. It was perfect. It was a hammer. It feels like google (overall, I don't just mean search) is losing their grasp on this. Stuff like charts API. Maybe it's just me, but the new version of this is annoying. It's some javascripty nonsense that feels complicated. It's a laser-guided, nuclear-powered gryoscopically stabilized, diamond-tipped screwdriver that can also make coffee and fold your laundry. You could build a submarine with it. But it's also got an instruction manual that is a foot thick. The old api was just: <img src='https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc&#62 https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc> or something similar. And now I can't +term, they took away the links to "cached" versions of the pages, things autocomplete (incorrectly), it assumes I meant something that I didn't, it wants to integrate into a social network, etc. etc. Google...you're starting to feel a little microsofty. Are you okay?

untog 15y ago

I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance: If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far. As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?

jsnell 15y ago
> I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous, but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok. The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.

jellicle 15y ago

This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand. I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages. I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.

frankydp 15y ago
I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in which "freshness" would not improve quality. Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley Effect" or new is always better. IMO. The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this specific change is overly relevant.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

nextparadigms 15y ago

What I dislike the most from recent updates is the preview feature. I find it completely gets in my way, and it's very easy to unintentionally make it preview something, when I just want to scan the results. Does anyone else find that feature useful?

epoxyhockey 15y ago
I never understood the usefulness of the preview feature. The only time I find it marginally interesting is when a website is currently down or had recently been taken offline. Though, I find the "cache:" query more useful in those cases anyway. The preview window does pop-up unexpectedly for me as well. I guess my mouse pointer wanders over to the right side of the search result every once in a while, triggering the preview.
- brc 15y ago
  I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone understood it, now it's gone. Boo.
  - Matt_Cutts 15y ago
    The cached link is still there. Look for it on the page preview.
    - brc 15y ago
      Can't we just have it back where it was?
wahnfrieden 15y ago
I don't at all, and find it incredibly distracting to have movement on the entire right half o the page when I'm just trying to scan the search result text.
15y ago

danilocampos 15y ago

I hope this works. Searches for error messages and the like are often cluttered with results from 2009 or earlier, describing troubleshooting steps that are out of date or unnecessary. At this point I add the current year to the end of any given troubleshooting search – and even that isn't always enough.

jontas 15y ago
I run into this problem all the time. I usually hit the "More search tools" link and then limit my search to the past year or so (depending on the issue). Also including specific version numbers helps as well.. but maybe this update will make those techniques irrelevant.

pavel 15y ago

Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page, now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one else experience a degradation in the quality of results?

jakeonthemove 15y ago
Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if I'm logged out of my Google account...
- fred_nada 15y ago
  Yes, i noticed better results outside of personalized search... It is a hassle to logout thought. I actually use bing for 90% of searches... google is better at tech searches like mysql questions, but outside of that there results have gotten more irrelevant and crowded with useless content...

simon_weber 15y ago

Glad this is here; I really liked Google realtime when it was around.

thaumaturgy 15y ago

Since I never seem to miss a chance to criticize Google: Thank you, Google. This should make your search results much more helpful.

sant0sk1 15y ago

This is a much welcomed change. I find that I quite often want recency based searches and blogged a quick solution if you're using Chrome: http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recency-based-google-searches-in-chrome/ http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recen...

JonnieCache 15y ago

Hopefully this will help out the perl crew and their problem with stale tutorials. The leeds doc is still top result, but hopefully this will make it easier for them to push new stuff up there.

jakeonthemove 15y ago

I hope they thought everything through, because there are a lot of cases where old content is just as good or even better - there are a lot of "timeless" articles and video out there. However, when it comes to software/tech/anything fast moving, I'd really like to see the latest results first. I'm tired of searching for "how to set psa-proftpd to standalone in plesk" (just a quick example off the top of my head) and get 5 year old results that have long since stopped being relevant...

cbr 15y ago

Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the early 1990s): https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial

jakeonthemove 15y ago

They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...

3pt14159 15y ago

I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.

suivix 15y ago

It's amusing how the megacorp Google uses the Occupy protests as the main example of their search changes.

kkihara 15y ago

The real question is, do we have an alternative?