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A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painfu

A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read? My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product. Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do additional products, you can add a kind of clunky single-signon, whatever. Because at the end of the day, the user needs the thing you have that no one else does. Now, Google had this. But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk, with plenty of equivalent nonsense in other verticals (hello, ebooks!). So, already, Google took its eye off the ball for the one thing that previously had been inviolable. And now there's the comically titled SPYW. Google's not stupid: they get that the rise of mobile and specialty apps/services that go with it are going to whittle away at the searches they'll be asked to do. They've bet the company on Android and Google+ giving them an out. Android was a good call, as it puts them in the driver's seat for a lot of this mobile action. But they need the web, too. Can they get away with compromising their search with this nouveau portal strategy? My hunch is that they're going to pay dearly in the process of finding out the answer is no. They're too big and too smart not to make the transition to whatever the next big thing is after search. But boy – screwing with the golden goose that earns both reputation and cash? Well, give 'em this: they're willing to take risks.

joebadmo 15y ago
I disagree with your premise. The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data. I'm a bit confused by the recent outcry about relevance. Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter? It seems like a pretty clear strategy to me of simultaneously trying to grab as much social signal as possible by creating a meaningfully competitive social product, while also demonstrating to its competitors the value of allowing Google access to social signals. I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  > The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data. You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. Adoption curves are led by early adopters. Do they really want to send the sort of person who was once a Google advocate into the arms of a competing service? > I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world. I don't think we actually disagree here. If Google does nothing, it's dead. I'm just not sure that the something they've chosen to do is going to be a good idea. If they lose the plot on search, there's not much to fall back on. But, sometimes you do have to bet the farm.
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault. We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.
    - danilocampos 15y ago
      I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me. The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something. As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious. I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google. Or maybe not. We'll see. I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.
waqf 15y ago
I think Google thinks that you and I, who want a search tool that does what you ask for, are a niche market not worth going after. I have no idea whether they're right.
- AlexandrB 15y ago
  It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.
  - nooneelse 15y ago
    Isn't Bing also including social signals in personalizing their search results? If so, neither of them are just sticking to the task of being a simple search engine like we knew and loved years ago.
- VikingCoder 15y ago
  Have neither of you heard of verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t... Or turning off Search Plus Your World? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAALU/ZFkWokAloIM/s400/Toggle.png http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL... No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?
  - waqf 15y ago
    Mostly, I'm able to search what I want but it takes me so many extra clicks that I can tell they don't respect my use cases. For example, if I could I'd set synonym replacement on but turn off assuming I misspelled what I typed. Where's the option for that?
    - VikingCoder 15y ago
      Out of curiosity ...what's an example search? Where, you typed a word, that looks convincingly like another word had been misspelled, but in fact is correctly spelled - but has synonyms that you want to look for?
pshc 15y ago
Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same... I hope their search quality improves. I understand it's an arms race with spammers, and they do give a lot of value for free minus ads. I guess I'm so attuned to identifying bad results by now that I haven't noticed much variability in results quality. But echo-chamber curation doesn't feel right, and the feel is important.
- 6ren 15y ago
  I've noticed both (typos and stems), and am impressed with how accurate it is. I miss literal search, and then they removed +keyword - but fortunately, quotes do it now. For example, rip and "rip" give slightly different results, with different emphasis within them: https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it is so fast - you can select the search you want. It's tab-completion for the web. And it can be informative in itself, if you aren't sure of the right terms. (i.e. the deep search problem of not knowing what you are looking for). I think they are doing a great job of searching for what you want - which is their goal. Technically precise searches aren't their main goal (though I wish they retained it somewhere). However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? EDIT ok, the evidence is explicit and damning: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php EDIT2 ok, I'm not getting the results they claim, at all. I'm using "google.com" but from Australia. Maybe that's why.
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? I think the notion of objectivity in search is a fallacy, and I would hesitate to characterize the addition of social search as artificial inflation, at least not any more artificial than any other part of the algorithm. The fact is: Google has more information about how to rank G+ profiles than any other profiles. That extra information adds google juice. Yes, other social networking profiles are indexed and ranked, but Google doesn't have the appropriate extra information on them that it does wrt G+. This doesn't seem particularly hard to understand, and I'm not sure how the focusontheuser.org bookmarklet illuminates the issue. I agree that the G+ profiles are probably given too much weight, and that's probably for two reasons: 1. It's brand new and requires more data for calibration; 2. It props up G+ as a product. From Google's perspective, even if search quality is negatively impacted in the short term while they calibrate and funnel users into G+, as long as in the long term search quality is bolstered by the additional subsequent data, it's a win.
ArcticCelt 15y ago
Just to confirm what you say about Google trying to be too smart I just searched for "SPYW" because to be honest I have no idea what is that word or abbreviation. So Google decided that I am searching for the word SPYWare and I was no able to find a definition for SPYW. That's why I am reading the comments in case I can guess what it is.
- karpathy 15y ago
  it's simple! You just need to search "define: spyw" Definition for spyw: Web definitions: (SPYWS) Stroke Prevention in Young Women Study. www.health.am/acronyms/s7/ you're welcome! (edit: to be fair though, the first link is a good one and explains the whole situation) (edit 2: oh wait! That's because of my personal search results. This is too funny)
- dminor 15y ago
  I didn't have any problems with this search. Perhaps it autocompleted to "spyware" and you didn't notice?
- robryan 15y ago
  Even if this was the case, the little of this article gives you enough info to google "SPYW google" which is even more likely to get what you want. Personally the second result down for me was on this topic for your search.
temphn 15y ago
The thing is that Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year. But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating. Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.
Stormbringer 15y ago
I think Digg is an excellent comparison. Putting paid ads in the stream of Diggs basically killed them dead. Then they had to start pretending that things had more upvotes than they really did, which made it worse. The place ghetto-ised in a scarily quick fashion. I'm not sure though how much the earlier 'Digg-revolts' over senselessly mucking around with the UI contributed. Had they already destroyed or eroded a lot of the goodwill of their users? Personally I believe the problem started back when they decided to boot Apple stories off the front page, and twiddled their algorithm to achieve it. Yes, Windows fanboys hated seeing those stories popping up all the time, and would go in and troll the Apple fans something chronic (and then complain that it was justified because the Apple users were doing the same thing - even though they weren't)... but doctoring the results like that just meant that what was (at that time) basically one of the few IT companies doing new and interesting things, instead of just being a "me too" copycat.
- robryan 15y ago
  Digg had plenty of competitors, even when they were at their peak. Arguably Google clearly has the best product, and they have become synonymous with searching the Internet.
jrockway 15y ago
But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results. For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want. Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.) Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data. Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW. Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more. I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway. Matt Cutts wrote a good article about this, BTW: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/
- 15y ago
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit. The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications. There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) that don't pretend to have lofty corporate values. Yet we keep buying their products and they keep making assloads of money. That's the way it is.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) Speak for yourself... there are plenty of us who cheerily invite Apple to go straight to hell. You can certainly count me among their number, for one. I have no use whatsoever for their anti-hacker ethos, their locked-down, proprietary, "no user repairable parts inside" attitude, and the arrogance with which they presume to know more about what the customer needs, than the customer does. I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit. That's hardly a settled point. There's evidence on both sides of the argument, to this day.
  - jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
    "Plenty of us" where plenty equals...how many? Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week.
    - mindcrime 15y ago
      Plenty of us" where plenty equals...how many? Honestly, from my point of view, just myself counts as "plenty" in this context. But I'm pretty sure the number is actually higher than that. Just count up all the F/OSS ideologues who refuse to use closed-source / proprietary software as a matter of principle, for starters. And I'm guessing there are a handful of folks who don't count themselves as total GNU hippies, but still prefer to shy away from companies that sell products based around such a locked-down, proprietary, closed-off ethos. Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week. I never said they weren't successful... I'm just saying that not everybody buys into their bullshit or likes their shitty proprietary products, that's all.
landhar 15y ago
> And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. This is my perception of how Google evolved: In the early days, it used to be like running grep on the whole internet but getting your results sorted by a very relevant algorithm (page rank). Then over the years they added a lot of features that fell into three categories: * operators to run more powerful queries * adding more complexity to the sorting of the results (localization, penalizing websites trying to game the algorithm, ...) * adding widgets given the query (ups tracking, weather, calculator, ...) These were all good, and I loved the fact that you could run some very clever and complex queries to get exactly what you wanted (and the googledorks were born...). But recent improvements to Google have all been about "guessing what the user wants" (the best illustration of that is the search as you type) and while it's hard to argue about the validity of this approach my problem with it is that it won't give me any fallback options when it guesses wrong. To be honest, Google does a very good job at guessing what I want. But the frustration caused by the few times it doesn't get it just makes me miss the "old google". And with every new recent improvement I keep being reminded of the MentalPlex [1] [1] http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/ http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/
hrktb 15y ago
Totally agree, and this whole thread allowed me to understand very clearly my gripes about the evolution of google search. I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches, very local results for everyday related searches. And these expectations might change depending on any random factor. I don't think google can weasel out what I want in what context. And I don't feel like adjusting dozens of options everytime I do a different kind of search. Before google started making search smarter, the burden was on my shoulder to do the work to get relevant results for my queries. Now that the algorithms do more and more assumptions, I get to fight with it more and more, and before the blame lies on my search skills, it goes to google for making it hard. My solution was to use separate engines (including multiple instance of the same ones, like ncr, US only, jp only etc), but a fast a dumb engine is really the way to go.
- landhar 15y ago
  Very well said. I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.
towaway4321 15y ago
Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
tetiitet543 15y ago
Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

joebadmo 15y ago

I disagree with your premise. The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data. I'm a bit confused by the recent outcry about relevance. Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter? It seems like a pretty clear strategy to me of simultaneously trying to grab as much social signal as possible by creating a meaningfully competitive social product, while also demonstrating to its competitors the value of allowing Google access to social signals. I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.

danilocampos 15y ago
> The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data. You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. Adoption curves are led by early adopters. Do they really want to send the sort of person who was once a Google advocate into the arms of a competing service? > I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world. I don't think we actually disagree here. If Google does nothing, it's dead. I'm just not sure that the something they've chosen to do is going to be a good idea. If they lose the plot on search, there's not much to fall back on. But, sometimes you do have to bet the farm.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault. We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me. The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something. As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious. I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google. Or maybe not. We'll see. I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.

waqf 15y ago

I think Google thinks that you and I, who want a search tool that does what you ask for, are a niche market not worth going after. I have no idea whether they're right.

AlexandrB 15y ago
It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.
- nooneelse 15y ago
  Isn't Bing also including social signals in personalizing their search results? If so, neither of them are just sticking to the task of being a simple search engine like we knew and loved years ago.
VikingCoder 15y ago
Have neither of you heard of verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t... Or turning off Search Plus Your World? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAALU/ZFkWokAloIM/s400/Toggle.png http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL... No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?
- waqf 15y ago
  Mostly, I'm able to search what I want but it takes me so many extra clicks that I can tell they don't respect my use cases. For example, if I could I'd set synonym replacement on but turn off assuming I misspelled what I typed. Where's the option for that?
  - VikingCoder 15y ago
    Out of curiosity ...what's an example search? Where, you typed a word, that looks convincingly like another word had been misspelled, but in fact is correctly spelled - but has synonyms that you want to look for?

pshc 15y ago

Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same... I hope their search quality improves. I understand it's an arms race with spammers, and they do give a lot of value for free minus ads. I guess I'm so attuned to identifying bad results by now that I haven't noticed much variability in results quality. But echo-chamber curation doesn't feel right, and the feel is important.

6ren 15y ago
I've noticed both (typos and stems), and am impressed with how accurate it is. I miss literal search, and then they removed +keyword - but fortunately, quotes do it now. For example, rip and "rip" give slightly different results, with different emphasis within them: https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22 Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it is so fast - you can select the search you want. It's tab-completion for the web. And it can be informative in itself, if you aren't sure of the right terms. (i.e. the deep search problem of not knowing what you are looking for). I think they are doing a great job of searching for what you want - which is their goal. Technically precise searches aren't their main goal (though I wish they retained it somewhere). However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? EDIT ok, the evidence is explicit and damning: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php EDIT2 ok, I'm not getting the results they claim, at all. I'm using "google.com" but from Australia. Maybe that's why.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? I think the notion of objectivity in search is a fallacy, and I would hesitate to characterize the addition of social search as artificial inflation, at least not any more artificial than any other part of the algorithm. The fact is: Google has more information about how to rank G+ profiles than any other profiles. That extra information adds google juice. Yes, other social networking profiles are indexed and ranked, but Google doesn't have the appropriate extra information on them that it does wrt G+. This doesn't seem particularly hard to understand, and I'm not sure how the focusontheuser.org bookmarklet illuminates the issue. I agree that the G+ profiles are probably given too much weight, and that's probably for two reasons: 1. It's brand new and requires more data for calibration; 2. It props up G+ as a product. From Google's perspective, even if search quality is negatively impacted in the short term while they calibrate and funnel users into G+, as long as in the long term search quality is bolstered by the additional subsequent data, it's a win.

ArcticCelt 15y ago

Just to confirm what you say about Google trying to be too smart I just searched for "SPYW" because to be honest I have no idea what is that word or abbreviation. So Google decided that I am searching for the word SPYWare and I was no able to find a definition for SPYW. That's why I am reading the comments in case I can guess what it is.

karpathy 15y ago
it's simple! You just need to search "define: spyw" Definition for spyw: Web definitions: (SPYWS) Stroke Prevention in Young Women Study. www.health.am/acronyms/s7/ you're welcome! (edit: to be fair though, the first link is a good one and explains the whole situation) (edit 2: oh wait! That's because of my personal search results. This is too funny)
dminor 15y ago
I didn't have any problems with this search. Perhaps it autocompleted to "spyware" and you didn't notice?
robryan 15y ago
Even if this was the case, the little of this article gives you enough info to google "SPYW google" which is even more likely to get what you want. Personally the second result down for me was on this topic for your search.

temphn 15y ago

The thing is that Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't. It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year. But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating. Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.

Stormbringer 15y ago

I think Digg is an excellent comparison. Putting paid ads in the stream of Diggs basically killed them dead. Then they had to start pretending that things had more upvotes than they really did, which made it worse. The place ghetto-ised in a scarily quick fashion. I'm not sure though how much the earlier 'Digg-revolts' over senselessly mucking around with the UI contributed. Had they already destroyed or eroded a lot of the goodwill of their users? Personally I believe the problem started back when they decided to boot Apple stories off the front page, and twiddled their algorithm to achieve it. Yes, Windows fanboys hated seeing those stories popping up all the time, and would go in and troll the Apple fans something chronic (and then complain that it was justified because the Apple users were doing the same thing - even though they weren't)... but doctoring the results like that just meant that what was (at that time) basically one of the few IT companies doing new and interesting things, instead of just being a "me too" copycat.

robryan 15y ago
Digg had plenty of competitors, even when they were at their peak. Arguably Google clearly has the best product, and they have become synonymous with searching the Internet.

jrockway 15y ago

But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results. For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want. Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.) Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data. Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW. Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more. I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway. Matt Cutts wrote a good article about this, BTW: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/ http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/

15y ago

jeffreymcmanus 15y ago

I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit. The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications. There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) that don't pretend to have lofty corporate values. Yet we keep buying their products and they keep making assloads of money. That's the way it is.

mindcrime 15y ago
There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) Speak for yourself... there are plenty of us who cheerily invite Apple to go straight to hell. You can certainly count me among their number, for one. I have no use whatsoever for their anti-hacker ethos, their locked-down, proprietary, "no user repairable parts inside" attitude, and the arrogance with which they presume to know more about what the customer needs, than the customer does. I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit. That's hardly a settled point. There's evidence on both sides of the argument, to this day.
- jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
  "Plenty of us" where plenty equals...how many? Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week.
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    Plenty of us" where plenty equals...how many? Honestly, from my point of view, just myself counts as "plenty" in this context. But I'm pretty sure the number is actually higher than that. Just count up all the F/OSS ideologues who refuse to use closed-source / proprietary software as a matter of principle, for starters. And I'm guessing there are a handful of folks who don't count themselves as total GNU hippies, but still prefer to shy away from companies that sell products based around such a locked-down, proprietary, closed-off ethos. Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week. I never said they weren't successful... I'm just saying that not everybody buys into their bullshit or likes their shitty proprietary products, that's all.

landhar 15y ago

> And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. This is my perception of how Google evolved: In the early days, it used to be like running grep on the whole internet but getting your results sorted by a very relevant algorithm (page rank). Then over the years they added a lot of features that fell into three categories: * operators to run more powerful queries * adding more complexity to the sorting of the results (localization, penalizing websites trying to game the algorithm, ...) * adding widgets given the query (ups tracking, weather, calculator, ...) These were all good, and I loved the fact that you could run some very clever and complex queries to get exactly what you wanted (and the googledorks were born...). But recent improvements to Google have all been about "guessing what the user wants" (the best illustration of that is the search as you type) and while it's hard to argue about the validity of this approach my problem with it is that it won't give me any fallback options when it guesses wrong. To be honest, Google does a very good job at guessing what I want. But the frustration caused by the few times it doesn't get it just makes me miss the "old google". And with every new recent improvement I keep being reminded of the MentalPlex [1] [1] http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/ http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/

hrktb 15y ago

Totally agree, and this whole thread allowed me to understand very clearly my gripes about the evolution of google search. I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches, very local results for everyday related searches. And these expectations might change depending on any random factor. I don't think google can weasel out what I want in what context. And I don't feel like adjusting dozens of options everytime I do a different kind of search. Before google started making search smarter, the burden was on my shoulder to do the work to get relevant results for my queries. Now that the algorithms do more and more assumptions, I get to fight with it more and more, and before the blame lies on my search skills, it goes to google for making it hard. My solution was to use separate engines (including multiple instance of the same ones, like ncr, US only, jp only etc), but a fast a dumb engine is really the way to go.

landhar 15y ago
Very well said. I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.

towaway4321 15y ago

Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

tetiitet543 15y ago