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Google search is an enigma to me. I oscillate from being blown away by its intelligence and accuracy to being gobsmacked by its stupidity and inefficiency. For

Google search is an enigma to me. I oscillate from being blown away by its intelligence and accuracy to being gobsmacked by its stupidity and inefficiency. For all tech related related search terms I usually have no issues with Google, but that is in large part thanks to stackoverflow. As soon as I venture out of anything having to do with tech I find myself lost in a wilderness of content farms a million miles wide and only an inch deep. I'm pretty internet savvy so I can eventually navigate my way to half-way decent answers, but I can only imagine how frustratingly useless google must seem to people who can't recognize the tell-tale signs of junk content. I find the most effective way to search is to already know where the most knowledgeable people gather around a specific topic and use google to search those sites specifically. I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search but it's a kludge at best and not something less tech savvy people are going to know how to do. And if I'm completely new to a topic it's often a chore just to even find the place where the experts actually hang out. I think the approach that Stackexchange is taking is going to be far more valuable in terms of search over the long run than Google. Time should be spent on figuring out how to reward domain knowledge experts and making sure they stay untainted and motivated to share their knowledge rather than tweaking a search algorithm in an endless cat-and-mouse game played with content farms.

mrfusion 12y ago
I agree. Why can't google just ban the content farms or let users specify it. I can list 5-10 sites that if omitted from all searches would vastly improve my results.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Also we almost need a search engine that has reverse SEO rules. For example if my search term is in the domain name I can actually be pretty sure it's not going to be valuable content. However google actually rewards that.
  - billmalarky 12y ago
    Google places much less emphasis on domain names now. http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53703/choosing-a-domain-name-with-joined-words-is-good-for-seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53703/choosing...
    - mrfusion 12y ago
      wow, didn't know that. So does that mean these days it's worth buying an aged domain?
      - billmalarky 12y ago
        I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. Not necessarily a SEO expert, just recently read about the domain exact match change.
    - LindaBuquet 12y ago
      Actually Google still LOVES EMDs in local. Check several competitive markets in bigger cities. Examples: City Dentist, City Personal Injury Attorney, City Chiropractor. For many the top 3 - 5 are EMDs. Google just reduced the weight of EMDs, so if thin or spammy content and all they have going for them is the EMD, they won't rank. But an EMD with good content and marketing still ranks well in local.
  - hagbardgroup 12y ago
    Meh. A lot of the problem with modern search is just that a lot of topics just don't have that many people who are both web-savvy and topic-savvy. Content farmers can be slain in the rankings easily by a superior resource, but that resource has to be attached to some sort of business engine to make it worthwhile enough to create. The hobbyist auto mechanic has less of an incentive to write great articles about auto maintenance than the auto parts corporation does. Adwords is also excellent, but the skill to use it is not well distributed. Advertisers have more obvious incentives and measurement metrics (return on total ad spent / return on investment) than hobbyists do.
- marknutter 12y ago
  You used to be able to change your search settings to ban certain domains. They removed this feature and instead offloaded that functionality to a chrome extension called Personal Blocklist. It's not an ideal solution: * It only works on chrome, obviously, because it's a chrome extension. That means you will continue to get crappy results on all your other browsers and devices. * It modifies the links after you load the page so you see them disappear which can be disorienting. I really don't want those search results even making it into the DOM. * As of now I'm not able to even edit my list (the options menu item is grayed out) and I have no idea why. The quality of the extension is poor at best. * It has zero intelligence. What would be ideal is that I could subscribe to a blocklist of well known content farms and allow crowdsourcing to maintain and add to that list. The clear message from Google is that it doesn't really want to support or encourage wholesale blocking of any domains. Google would prefer to be the entity that makes that decision for you, and since these content farms make Google a lot of money don't hold your breath that they're going to start cracking down in a serious way anytime soon.
  - wlesieutre 12y ago
    Perhaps Google doesn't want a robust blocking system because it would set off a cat-and-mouse game with the content farms continuously evolving to evade blocking? As they are, the content farms are annoying, but they're a relatively stable entity. It would get harder for Google to crawl new content on the internet because they'd be filtering through progressively more clever and aggressive farms to find real pages. I'm sure is already the case, but aggressive blocking would provoke farms into getting worse.
  - AJ007 12y ago
    The highest earning form of advertising for a content farm is Google. The fundamental concept of a content farm is to have mountains of content about any possible topic. The only ad network with inventory deep enough to cover this is Google. The difference being single digit CPMs verse triple digit. When Google created Adsense it built an ecosystem. While other search engines lost users as soon as they clicked on a link, Google had a fairly high percentage chance that user still made them money. I don't know if the future looks much better. What Larry Page is saying that instead of display a link of Stack Overflow results he would like to scrape the answer to the query in a way the user never has to go there. The way they will make money from advertising with that model looks even worse.
forgottenpass 12y ago
Google search was an amazing improvement when I found it in 2000, but sometimes I wonder if the post-2005 improvements of search results is nothing but a reflection of human progress digitizing data. There is more data online, and better organized than before. That improves google's results regardless of algorithmic strength. For any search where the first result is Wikipeida, the following results don't have to be any good, and there are plenty of terms where the next 20 results are just domains with lots of in-links hosting glossary and dictionary definitions. Tech was the first area to conduct large amounts of our work online and in the public's eye. As a result, almost all our meaningful literature, documentation, q&a (was mailing list archives, now is just stackoverflow) and "here's how I solved X" blog posts are available for google to scoop up.
drewvolpe 12y ago
I completely agree. I built myself a metasearch engine that uses StackExchange and other sources in parallel; for example: http://gigglebang.com/?q=postgres+replication+monitoring http://gigglebang.com/?q=postgres+replication+monitoring It's really basic, but I end up starting most of my searches there, and fallback to Google with a DDG-style !g if I need to.
ProAm 12y ago
I agree, Google seems to return things that I already know but cannot remember (i.e. address to my favorite restaurant), but when Im trying to research stuff I know nothing about the results that come back are less than useful. > The search engine is working on being able to provide direct answers to questions rather than just a list of results I dont want what they think the answer is to my question. They don't know my thought process or how I like to research information. I want raw data returned so I can sort and process it how I see fit, not them.
wslh 12y ago
But Google is more efficient than the specific StackExchange (et al) search if you restrict the query to that site. I am repeating myself but I think one way to compete with Google is making local search engines work better than Google itself restricted by that domain. The rant continue on Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1]. - [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challenging-googles-search-engine/ http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...
- marknutter 12y ago
  That's what I meant by "I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search". I add site:reddit.com or site:stackexchange.com to my google search query.
7952 12y ago
There must be a massive feedback loop at play. A site that is popular on Google becomes more popular because it is well placed on Google and will then be placed highly on Google as a result. Can a search engine really work when the search engine itself is the greatest decider of quality? This must cause unintended consequences.
- skkbits 12y ago
  totally agree. I have been researching on this topic for a while. In my opinion instant search makes killer. Any search term that is rising higher , making it appear in instant search just make it nuts and goes on breakout. I think google need to apply weight on content relevancy and not apply same rule to big and small guys.
scriptproof 12y ago
Google is a good search engine so such the question that you query has been asked on Stackoverflow. Otherwise you will go nowhere... And the way they evaluate the "quality" of a site by a simple mathematical formula is a joke. We have the same feeling that Larry about the search engine!!!

mrfusion 12y ago

I agree. Why can't google just ban the content farms or let users specify it. I can list 5-10 sites that if omitted from all searches would vastly improve my results.

mrfusion 12y ago
Also we almost need a search engine that has reverse SEO rules. For example if my search term is in the domain name I can actually be pretty sure it's not going to be valuable content. However google actually rewards that.
- billmalarky 12y ago
  Google places much less emphasis on domain names now. http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53703/choosing-a-domain-name-with-joined-words-is-good-for-seo http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53703/choosing...
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    wow, didn't know that. So does that mean these days it's worth buying an aged domain?
    - billmalarky 12y ago
      I couldn't tell you off the top of my head. Not necessarily a SEO expert, just recently read about the domain exact match change.
  - LindaBuquet 12y ago
    Actually Google still LOVES EMDs in local. Check several competitive markets in bigger cities. Examples: City Dentist, City Personal Injury Attorney, City Chiropractor. For many the top 3 - 5 are EMDs. Google just reduced the weight of EMDs, so if thin or spammy content and all they have going for them is the EMD, they won't rank. But an EMD with good content and marketing still ranks well in local.
- hagbardgroup 12y ago
  Meh. A lot of the problem with modern search is just that a lot of topics just don't have that many people who are both web-savvy and topic-savvy. Content farmers can be slain in the rankings easily by a superior resource, but that resource has to be attached to some sort of business engine to make it worthwhile enough to create. The hobbyist auto mechanic has less of an incentive to write great articles about auto maintenance than the auto parts corporation does. Adwords is also excellent, but the skill to use it is not well distributed. Advertisers have more obvious incentives and measurement metrics (return on total ad spent / return on investment) than hobbyists do.
marknutter 12y ago
You used to be able to change your search settings to ban certain domains. They removed this feature and instead offloaded that functionality to a chrome extension called Personal Blocklist. It's not an ideal solution: * It only works on chrome, obviously, because it's a chrome extension. That means you will continue to get crappy results on all your other browsers and devices. * It modifies the links after you load the page so you see them disappear which can be disorienting. I really don't want those search results even making it into the DOM. * As of now I'm not able to even edit my list (the options menu item is grayed out) and I have no idea why. The quality of the extension is poor at best. * It has zero intelligence. What would be ideal is that I could subscribe to a blocklist of well known content farms and allow crowdsourcing to maintain and add to that list. The clear message from Google is that it doesn't really want to support or encourage wholesale blocking of any domains. Google would prefer to be the entity that makes that decision for you, and since these content farms make Google a lot of money don't hold your breath that they're going to start cracking down in a serious way anytime soon.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  Perhaps Google doesn't want a robust blocking system because it would set off a cat-and-mouse game with the content farms continuously evolving to evade blocking? As they are, the content farms are annoying, but they're a relatively stable entity. It would get harder for Google to crawl new content on the internet because they'd be filtering through progressively more clever and aggressive farms to find real pages. I'm sure is already the case, but aggressive blocking would provoke farms into getting worse.
- AJ007 12y ago
  The highest earning form of advertising for a content farm is Google. The fundamental concept of a content farm is to have mountains of content about any possible topic. The only ad network with inventory deep enough to cover this is Google. The difference being single digit CPMs verse triple digit. When Google created Adsense it built an ecosystem. While other search engines lost users as soon as they clicked on a link, Google had a fairly high percentage chance that user still made them money. I don't know if the future looks much better. What Larry Page is saying that instead of display a link of Stack Overflow results he would like to scrape the answer to the query in a way the user never has to go there. The way they will make money from advertising with that model looks even worse.

forgottenpass 12y ago

Google search was an amazing improvement when I found it in 2000, but sometimes I wonder if the post-2005 improvements of search results is nothing but a reflection of human progress digitizing data. There is more data online, and better organized than before. That improves google's results regardless of algorithmic strength. For any search where the first result is Wikipeida, the following results don't have to be any good, and there are plenty of terms where the next 20 results are just domains with lots of in-links hosting glossary and dictionary definitions. Tech was the first area to conduct large amounts of our work online and in the public's eye. As a result, almost all our meaningful literature, documentation, q&a (was mailing list archives, now is just stackoverflow) and "here's how I solved X" blog posts are available for google to scoop up.

drewvolpe 12y ago

I completely agree. I built myself a metasearch engine that uses StackExchange and other sources in parallel; for example: http://gigglebang.com/?q=postgres+replication+monitoring http://gigglebang.com/?q=postgres+replication+monitoring It's really basic, but I end up starting most of my searches there, and fallback to Google with a DDG-style !g if I need to.

ProAm 12y ago

I agree, Google seems to return things that I already know but cannot remember (i.e. address to my favorite restaurant), but when Im trying to research stuff I know nothing about the results that come back are less than useful. > The search engine is working on being able to provide direct answers to questions rather than just a list of results I dont want what they think the answer is to my question. They don't know my thought process or how I like to research information. I want raw data returned so I can sort and process it how I see fit, not them.

wslh 12y ago

But Google is more efficient than the specific StackExchange (et al) search if you restrict the query to that site. I am repeating myself but I think one way to compete with Google is making local search engines work better than Google itself restricted by that domain. The rant continue on Challenging Google’s Search Engine [1]. - [1] http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challenging-googles-search-engine/ http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challeng...

marknutter 12y ago
That's what I meant by "I will often search within the context of content aggregators like hacker news, reddit, stackexchange, and other various forums before I rely on a naked Google search". I add site:reddit.com or site:stackexchange.com to my google search query.

7952 12y ago

There must be a massive feedback loop at play. A site that is popular on Google becomes more popular because it is well placed on Google and will then be placed highly on Google as a result. Can a search engine really work when the search engine itself is the greatest decider of quality? This must cause unintended consequences.

skkbits 12y ago
totally agree. I have been researching on this topic for a while. In my opinion instant search makes killer. Any search term that is rising higher , making it appear in instant search just make it nuts and goes on breakout. I think google need to apply weight on content relevancy and not apply same rule to big and small guys.

scriptproof 12y ago

Google is a good search engine so such the question that you query has been asked on Stackoverflow. Otherwise you will go nowhere... And the way they evaluate the "quality" of a site by a simple mathematical formula is a joke. We have the same feeling that Larry about the search engine!!!