8 ms·

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results

by rsync 14y ago

All grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for term, doesn't exist.

wslh 14y ago
Use the verbatim mode in the search results. In this way Google returns results with all your terms.
- Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
  Is there a way to make this the default, so I don't have to click, search tools -> all results -> verbatim? Edit: Thanks, comex. Made google.com become: http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1 http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1
  - comex 14y ago
    If you use your browser to initiate searches (and aren't using Safari), it's just a matter of changing the search URL to add &tbs=li:1.
Sven7 14y ago
Google needs to create a search market place around that index of theirs. They need to open it up. Search is too big a problem for just a couple people at Mountain View to be working on. And at this stage with the amount of data being generated, no one really has the infrastructure to compete. Hope they do it before the regulators make them. If Apple has succeeded at building a market place around their closed platform Google can too.
- rgrieselhuber 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure that more than just a couple people work on search at Google. ;)
  - Sven7 14y ago
    More than a couple work at Apple too. But the 50 billion app downloads came from an ecosystem of millions of developers around the world.
    - nostrademons 14y ago
      What would "extensions" to search look like? Google had "Subscribed Links" from roughly 2006 to 2009, which would let users opt in to receiving links from third parties for certain queries (eg. I added a Javadoc extension that would show me the official Javadoc when I searched for a Java class). Nobody used them. Search isn't a market like mobile phones: it serves an immediate, well-defined need, and there doesn't seem to be a need for third parties to jump in.
      - DanBC 14y ago
        I want a search that works for Usenet news. Yes, I understand that Usenet news is dead, but still, effective searching would be nice and Usenet search has been broken for ages and ages. Another example is targeted search. For example, if I'm searching about mental health stuff I do want good quality sources, I don't want tabloid gossip about celebrities going into rehab. Or sometimes I want to break out of the SEO trash, and have a bit of serendipity. Search for a term like [spectacles cases]. You get a lot of shops selling pretty much identical cases. What you want is a nicer way to preview those shops (because often the websites are god-awful and their own site searches are much worse than anything Google provides.) WAIT: I just tried this to make sure I was right, and Google have changed the way they show results like this. You get the same ads at the top, with heavily SEOd content links below, but now at top right there's a "shopping" section with links to different cases in different shops. So, that's much better now than it used to be. Still, serendipity is fun. I remember when you used to be able to use Google to noodle around and find cool stuff. Now? Not so much. That's not Google's fault. The modern web is very different to what it used to be, but it'd be great if there was some way to get access to those smaller sites.
threeseed 14y ago
It is just me or is it a recent change ? I find Google Search to be incredibly frustrating to use because it chooses to ignore search terms even when pages exist with those terms. Google better be really careful because crippling the experience in order to sell more advertising reminds me why I switched away from Altavista.
- protomyth 14y ago
  There are very few things more frustrating then doing a search, opening the resulting page, then search for one of your search terms and find none.
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Google search for me (and I've been using it a very long time, having been an Internet user since the late 1980s and around when Google first appeared) has generally gotten worse over time, not better. I don't think the changes are to sell more advertising, though, I think they are a combination of: 1) The web is just much bigger and noisier than it ever was. There are so many SEO-bait sites out there now, it is a wonder search still works at all. I can't really fault Google for this part. 2) Changes Google made to make search more accessible to the mainstream user. Google search now tries way too hard to be "smart" about what the user meant to ask for instead of what he or she actually asked for and this can be a huge negative if the person is looking up precise information and knows how to use a search engine. They somewhat recently added a "Verbatim" option to search that can help you avoid some of this too-smartness, but even with that enabled Google is still inferior to what it used to be when I'm looking for very targeted technical information that I am sure exists out there. Sadly, this sort of thing is a trend impacting not just Google. The success of Apple has created a culture of creating things for the mainstream consumer user which often comes at the expense of the power user. I get why this is done and ultimately it is the right call for any business that could potentially serve the mainstream, but I do wish more companies would leave in the highly technical expert options as settings for those who are comfortable using them. I feel that in recent times most software in general has swung way too far on the pendulum from being too hard for normal people to use to being totally gimped for experts and feeling like a toy more than a tool and I wish attempts to try to support both sets of users became a "thing" instead of constantly hearing the mantra that "options or settings are bad, no options or settings for you"!
comex 14y ago
As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views". It seems much more likely that it was added for the obvious reason - to improve search results, on average, for most people, because relevant results don't always contain the exact search term you put in. In my case, as many times as it's burned me, there have also been a few where I remember it presenting exactly the results I wanted, and it's probably done so many more times without my noticing. YMMV, and it would certainly be nice if Google were better able to distinguish queries that should not be rewritten from ones that probably should, but that's no reason to assign nefarious motives. As has been mentioned, you should probably set your default search to verbatim mode.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- threeseed 14y ago
  Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant. Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.
  - comex 14y ago
    > Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Fair enough. Like I said, it can certainly be improved, and perhaps recent changes have gone too far. > Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers. Don't the kind of people that frequent this site near universally use their browsers to search, rather than wasting keypresses navigating to google.com? Ridiculously, Safari, which I use, requires an extension to use an arbitrary search engine, but I can't think of another browser that doesn't support it.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    It has probably been tuned to the "average" person who is looking for entertainment- or shopping-oriented results.
ako 14y ago
I almost never search for very specific terms, most of my searches are also approximate. In this case it's very helpful that the search results are also approximate. So I consider this a feature not a bug...
joe_the_user 14y ago
It should be mentioned that this move towards approximate search also gives strong indication of how little demand for real "smart search" there is in the search field. Alta Vista years ago had full logical search but Google beat them with simpler searches having greater relevance. Google's searches are now moving towards even less specificity. How much could greater language understanding help this? How many people want to go to the trouble of writing out a full sentence to specify exactly what they want? How much is it worth accommodating them? etc

by rsync 14y ago

wslh 14y ago

Use the verbatim mode in the search results. In this way Google returns results with all your terms.

Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
Is there a way to make this the default, so I don't have to click, search tools -> all results -> verbatim? Edit: Thanks, comex. Made google.com become: http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1 http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1
- comex 14y ago
  If you use your browser to initiate searches (and aren't using Safari), it's just a matter of changing the search URL to add &tbs=li:1.

Sven7 14y ago

Google needs to create a search market place around that index of theirs. They need to open it up. Search is too big a problem for just a couple people at Mountain View to be working on. And at this stage with the amount of data being generated, no one really has the infrastructure to compete. Hope they do it before the regulators make them. If Apple has succeeded at building a market place around their closed platform Google can too.

rgrieselhuber 14y ago
I'm pretty sure that more than just a couple people work on search at Google. ;)
- Sven7 14y ago
  More than a couple work at Apple too. But the 50 billion app downloads came from an ecosystem of millions of developers around the world.
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    What would "extensions" to search look like? Google had "Subscribed Links" from roughly 2006 to 2009, which would let users opt in to receiving links from third parties for certain queries (eg. I added a Javadoc extension that would show me the official Javadoc when I searched for a Java class). Nobody used them. Search isn't a market like mobile phones: it serves an immediate, well-defined need, and there doesn't seem to be a need for third parties to jump in.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      I want a search that works for Usenet news. Yes, I understand that Usenet news is dead, but still, effective searching would be nice and Usenet search has been broken for ages and ages. Another example is targeted search. For example, if I'm searching about mental health stuff I do want good quality sources, I don't want tabloid gossip about celebrities going into rehab. Or sometimes I want to break out of the SEO trash, and have a bit of serendipity. Search for a term like [spectacles cases]. You get a lot of shops selling pretty much identical cases. What you want is a nicer way to preview those shops (because often the websites are god-awful and their own site searches are much worse than anything Google provides.) WAIT: I just tried this to make sure I was right, and Google have changed the way they show results like this. You get the same ads at the top, with heavily SEOd content links below, but now at top right there's a "shopping" section with links to different cases in different shops. So, that's much better now than it used to be. Still, serendipity is fun. I remember when you used to be able to use Google to noodle around and find cool stuff. Now? Not so much. That's not Google's fault. The modern web is very different to what it used to be, but it'd be great if there was some way to get access to those smaller sites.

threeseed 14y ago

It is just me or is it a recent change ? I find Google Search to be incredibly frustrating to use because it chooses to ignore search terms even when pages exist with those terms. Google better be really careful because crippling the experience in order to sell more advertising reminds me why I switched away from Altavista.

protomyth 14y ago
There are very few things more frustrating then doing a search, opening the resulting page, then search for one of your search terms and find none.
georgemcbay 14y ago
Google search for me (and I've been using it a very long time, having been an Internet user since the late 1980s and around when Google first appeared) has generally gotten worse over time, not better. I don't think the changes are to sell more advertising, though, I think they are a combination of: 1) The web is just much bigger and noisier than it ever was. There are so many SEO-bait sites out there now, it is a wonder search still works at all. I can't really fault Google for this part. 2) Changes Google made to make search more accessible to the mainstream user. Google search now tries way too hard to be "smart" about what the user meant to ask for instead of what he or she actually asked for and this can be a huge negative if the person is looking up precise information and knows how to use a search engine. They somewhat recently added a "Verbatim" option to search that can help you avoid some of this too-smartness, but even with that enabled Google is still inferior to what it used to be when I'm looking for very targeted technical information that I am sure exists out there. Sadly, this sort of thing is a trend impacting not just Google. The success of Apple has created a culture of creating things for the mainstream consumer user which often comes at the expense of the power user. I get why this is done and ultimately it is the right call for any business that could potentially serve the mainstream, but I do wish more companies would leave in the highly technical expert options as settings for those who are comfortable using them. I feel that in recent times most software in general has swung way too far on the pendulum from being too hard for normal people to use to being totally gimped for experts and feeling like a toy more than a tool and I wish attempts to try to support both sets of users became a "thing" instead of constantly hearing the mantra that "options or settings are bad, no options or settings for you"!

comex 14y ago

As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views". It seems much more likely that it was added for the obvious reason - to improve search results, on average, for most people, because relevant results don't always contain the exact search term you put in. In my case, as many times as it's burned me, there have also been a few where I remember it presenting exactly the results I wanted, and it's probably done so many more times without my noticing. YMMV, and it would certainly be nice if Google were better able to distinguish queries that should not be rewritten from ones that probably should, but that's no reason to assign nefarious motives. As has been mentioned, you should probably set your default search to verbatim mode.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
threeseed 14y ago
Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Search for "vertx play framework" and the last two search results don't have the term vertx despite pages and pages of results with the term. I don't understand how dropping search terms can make the results more relevant. Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.
- comex 14y ago
  > Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying. Fair enough. Like I said, it can certainly be improved, and perhaps recent changes have gone too far. > Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers. Don't the kind of people that frequent this site near universally use their browsers to search, rather than wasting keypresses navigating to google.com? Ridiculously, Safari, which I use, requires an extension to use an arbitrary search engine, but I can't think of another browser that doesn't support it.
- ams6110 14y ago
  It has probably been tuned to the "average" person who is looking for entertainment- or shopping-oriented results.

ako 14y ago

I almost never search for very specific terms, most of my searches are also approximate. In this case it's very helpful that the search results are also approximate. So I consider this a feature not a bug...

joe_the_user 14y ago

It should be mentioned that this move towards approximate search also gives strong indication of how little demand for real "smart search" there is in the search field. Alta Vista years ago had full logical search but Google beat them with simpler searches having greater relevance. Google's searches are now moving towards even less specificity. How much could greater language understanding help this? How many people want to go to the trouble of writing out a full sentence to specify exactly what they want? How much is it worth accommodating them? etc