3 ms·

Google's search tweaks are making it better and better for most users. For me, though, I want the old simple-minded Google back. I would rather get what I ask

by dkarl 15y ago

Google's search tweaks are making it better and better for most users. For me, though, I want the old simple-minded Google back. I would rather get what I ask for, even when when it's garbage in/garbage out, than wonder if some heuristic somewhere is filtering out the pages I want to see. For example, I'm sure Google "knows" that I am a monolingual English speaker, but I can read enough German, French, and Spanish to struggle through a blog post telling me how to diagnose or work around a problem with my computer when that's my only choice. (Especially now that Chrome will run the whole thing through Google Translate for me.) I set an option in Google to show me pages in other languages, but these days I don't see non-English results anymore unless there are only a few pages of search results. It seems like non-English pages are penalized heavily, regardless of how high they rank as search results. (Or did everyone who used to post about technical topics in German switch to English over the last five years?) Even if that's not true, the fact that I even think about it is a bother. I wish Google would be more simple-minded so I could have more confidence in how I understand the results.

6ren 15y ago
> Google Search automatically returns results in the language you choose for Google product text, but you can also request results in many other languages. Try setting German at "For Google text" (first on language preference page). I did, and got several german hits. Whereas, merely adding "german" for the search results (second on language preferences page) didn't add any. It's a hassle, but a solution is to change your "For Google text" setting. for each language you want. It seems to me that the vastly greater number of english results would simply out-weigh the german resuls. The german results will still be there, but ranked much lower. What's curious to me is that you say Google didn't formerly do this. Maybe they changed the weighting of the various languages from being equal to being weighted according to the results. Probably searching with german terms will get german results, but again a hassle because you have to do it for each language. EDIT following guelo's comment on "verbatim" under "All Results -> More Search Tools" on the left hand side, there's also a "Translated foreign pages" option. This gave me several results in other languages. Sounds like what you want. BONUS: I noticed a "Search English and German pages" just under "Search the web" on the left hand side (I added German as a search language above). I think this is precisely what you wanted. Google is impressing me.
- dkarl 15y ago
  Google is impressing me. Really? All that to get what I used to get for free? Not to mention that German is just one language, and "translated foreign pages" sounds like it might search the translated text, which is nice, unless it doesn't deliver results in untranslated pages, which leaves me wondering whether Google translates all pages or just some, and whether it's sufficiently integrated with Google Translate to filter out words that can't be translated, which are often exactly the words I want. That puts me right back where I started, sitting in front of Google wondering how the hell it works and what it's filtering out of the internet as a result.
  - 6ren 15y ago
    Wow, I go to some trouble to research your question for you, but you reply in complaint without trying it out. e.g. try it with more than one language selected for search. You can also test your questions with specific queries (e.g. using terms that seem unlikely to be translated). Also, consider that you didn't know what results Google wasn't returning in the first place, years ago (e.g. by not having indexed them). Google aims at working without thought. But it can only do so for one target audience, and unfortunately for technically minded folk, that target has to be mainstream users. Fortunately, technical folk are usually curious to explore and customize technology. EDIT just confirmed that it does use added search languages, as expected. e.g. if I add german and french, it provides: "Search English and French and German pages" Note: I'm not doing this for you; but because I'm curious.
    - dkarl 15y ago
      To be absolutely clear, I'm complaining about Google, not you, and I already said Google's behavior is better for most users. I'm not really sure what more I can say to be "nice" and still be honest, because I am angry that I was missing search results because of a behind-the-scenes change that I would only have discovered if I was regularly checking my preferences to see if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted. And that's what I found: when they created this settings page they erased whatever language settings I had (which I think was just "yes, I would like to see languages other than English") and left only English selected. Honestly, you shouldn't be so sensitive that you perceive criticism of a web app as criticism of your advice, or assume that I didn't check up on it. I just wasn't happy about what I found. Per my first post, all I want is to be able to use Google and understand roughly what it's doing, and it failed very badly in this case, since the one thing I was counting on it to do -- include foreign language pages, because I asked it to -- was actually the thing it wasn't doing.

by dkarl 15y ago

6ren 15y ago

> Google Search automatically returns results in the language you choose for Google product text, but you can also request results in many other languages. Try setting German at "For Google text" (first on language preference page). I did, and got several german hits. Whereas, merely adding "german" for the search results (second on language preferences page) didn't add any. It's a hassle, but a solution is to change your "For Google text" setting. for each language you want. It seems to me that the vastly greater number of english results would simply out-weigh the german resuls. The german results will still be there, but ranked much lower. What's curious to me is that you say Google didn't formerly do this. Maybe they changed the weighting of the various languages from being equal to being weighted according to the results. Probably searching with german terms will get german results, but again a hassle because you have to do it for each language. EDIT following guelo's comment on "verbatim" under "All Results -> More Search Tools" on the left hand side, there's also a "Translated foreign pages" option. This gave me several results in other languages. Sounds like what you want. BONUS: I noticed a "Search English and German pages" just under "Search the web" on the left hand side (I added German as a search language above). I think this is precisely what you wanted. Google is impressing me.

dkarl 15y ago
Google is impressing me. Really? All that to get what I used to get for free? Not to mention that German is just one language, and "translated foreign pages" sounds like it might search the translated text, which is nice, unless it doesn't deliver results in untranslated pages, which leaves me wondering whether Google translates all pages or just some, and whether it's sufficiently integrated with Google Translate to filter out words that can't be translated, which are often exactly the words I want. That puts me right back where I started, sitting in front of Google wondering how the hell it works and what it's filtering out of the internet as a result.
- 6ren 15y ago
  Wow, I go to some trouble to research your question for you, but you reply in complaint without trying it out. e.g. try it with more than one language selected for search. You can also test your questions with specific queries (e.g. using terms that seem unlikely to be translated). Also, consider that you didn't know what results Google wasn't returning in the first place, years ago (e.g. by not having indexed them). Google aims at working without thought. But it can only do so for one target audience, and unfortunately for technically minded folk, that target has to be mainstream users. Fortunately, technical folk are usually curious to explore and customize technology. EDIT just confirmed that it does use added search languages, as expected. e.g. if I add german and french, it provides: "Search English and French and German pages" Note: I'm not doing this for you; but because I'm curious.
  - dkarl 15y ago
    To be absolutely clear, I'm complaining about Google, not you, and I already said Google's behavior is better for most users. I'm not really sure what more I can say to be "nice" and still be honest, because I am angry that I was missing search results because of a behind-the-scenes change that I would only have discovered if I was regularly checking my preferences to see if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted. And that's what I found: when they created this settings page they erased whatever language settings I had (which I think was just "yes, I would like to see languages other than English") and left only English selected. Honestly, you shouldn't be so sensitive that you perceive criticism of a web app as criticism of your advice, or assume that I didn't check up on it. I just wasn't happy about what I found. Per my first post, all I want is to be able to use Google and understand roughly what it's doing, and it failed very badly in this case, since the one thing I was counting on it to do -- include foreign language pages, because I asked it to -- was actually the thing it wasn't doing.