6 ms·

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 redire

• 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?
  • nyellin 15y ago
    I wish Google catered more to geeks. I understand how Google indexes the web. Let me control my own queries. Give us geeks the ability to enable/disable freshness, even if it means appending &fresh=0 to the URL
    • jsnell 15y ago
      They already give you tools all the way to an exact date range search! How much more control do you want.
      • nyellin 15y ago
        I didn't realize it when I posted. Here is Matt Cutts' explanation of the date options: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/useful-google-feature-better-date-search/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/useful-google-feature-better-d...
        • Sniffnoy 15y ago
          I still wish there a sort by date option, for when I'm trying to find the oldest occurrence of something...
          • sneaky_ruds 15y ago
            In fact there is. You have to click on one of the other date options before it shows up. For instance, http://www.google.com/webhp?&ie=UTF-8#q=occupy+oakland&hl=en&tbs=qdr:d3,sbd:1 http://www.google.com/webhp?&ie=UTF-8#q=occupy+oakland&#... shows results from the last three days, sorted by date.
            • Sniffnoy 15y ago
              Huh, that's good to know. Unfortunately what I was looking for was a reverse sort by date...
  • 15y ago
• moultano 15y ago
  If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.
  • blhack 15y ago
    Is there a link to "tell google that this autocorrect was wrong" somewhere under the search box? Because that might be helpful.
    • chc 15y ago
      They probably keep track of whether you click the "No, really search for my search terms" link.
  • natesm 15y ago
    Ah, this is one of those situations where you'd love to remember an example or more, but everything you try actually works - then sometime a few days later it happens!
  • iron_ball 15y ago
    Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially offensive.
    • jakeonthemove 15y ago
      That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...
    • moultano 15y ago
      Thanks!
  • pluies 15y ago
    I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly: true? scheme Redirects to a search for "true scheme". +true? scheme Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay. "true?" scheme Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme". +"true?" scheme Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• recoiledsnake 15y ago
  A recent example, searching for eb_row returns results for 'eyebrow' And the worst thing? The search page is without even the "Did you mean" links! http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=eb_row&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=e... I can't imagine Google devs are happy with this. Cmon Google, let us geeks in on the internal search that your devs use. Host it at geek.google.com or whatever. Probably won't happen since geeks don't click on ads much, and Google is cutting down on dev friendly side projects like code.google.com these days.
  • jakeonthemove 15y ago
    Yeah, not even the quotes help in some cases, and I expect Google to show me results that contain the exact word I'm searching for, no matter if it thinks I misspelled it (it's like the algorithm says "let me correct that for you, stupid" :-)...
• teflonhook 15y ago
  They probably make more money from ads by autocorrecting.