[rsync]

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.

[comex]

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.

[threeseed]

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]

> 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]

It has probably been tuned to the "average" person who is looking for entertainment- or shopping-oriented results.

[foobarqux]

Add quotes around vertx.

[espeed]

This is where I miss the old + sign.

[OGinparadise]

>> As annoying as the approximation can be, I'd like a citation for "to drive ad views".

Not 100% proof but ad views and clicks seem to be increasing by 20% to 30% each quarter. Google tests everything to death and they please wall st with those ad click increases.

[magicalist]

If you look at the quarterly earnings reports, it's typically 20-30% year over year, not quarter over quarter. Keep in mind that the population of internet users is estimated to be growing about 10% year over year alone (though not always in places where Google is dominant), google's usage rate is still increasing in many places outside of the US, and then there's the fact that we all use the internet more every year, etc.

Besides, without any other data or even a clear mechanism of action, you could just as easily say they're just better achieving their stated goal of only showing ads that the people who see them are interested in seeing. That's supposed to be one of the benefits of the auction-based approach of adwords. 20-30% is a lot for that, but who knows?

Really, I think you're seeing a pattern there that you want to see, and I'll second comex's call for real evidence.

[OGinparadise]

A lot can be attributed to more ads on pages, true. But do people go there to see a page full of ads or "most relevant" and "unbiased results"? How many know ads from content?

But growth in places where Google makes its real money (US, EU, Canada etc) has plateaued for a while, IIRC. Growth in ad clicks mirrors growth in revenue and we know a click from Guatemala is not the same as one from NYC.

>>Besides, without any other data or even a clear mechanism of action, you could just as easily say they're just better achieving their stated goal of only showing ads that the people who see them are interested in seeing.

Maybe, but if you read the comments, people are accusing Google of making results worst to boost the ad click rate. That's wrong on so many levels.

[magicalist]

> But growth in places where Google makes its real money (US, EU, Canada etc) has plateaued for a while, IIRC. Growth in ad clicks mirrors growth in revenue and we know a click from Guatemala is not the same as one from NYC.

Actually, average cost per click has been going down for a while now. I don't see any breakdown by geography, and wall street had been all worried about what that means for an ever-more-mobile world, but, again, the data isn't there to back up your supposition. A large part of it could be growth in regions that bring in lower ad revenue.

> Maybe, but if you read the comments, people are accusing Google of making results worst to boost the ad click rate. That's wrong on so many levels.

Er, what is wrong on so many levels? I can't tell what you mean from that sentence construction. You say, "maybe", so you don't disagree with me, but you backed up the only other "accuser" in your post above, so I don't think you disagree with him...

In any case, the considerably more obvious and likely explanation is the one I think most people have tended to assume: google disambiguates terms automatically because it's what works in the 90% case. It's annoying for power users, yes (even back when it was less of an issue, at least we could +terms, so I miss +ing terms like crazy with today's google), but it makes no sense to attempt to optimize for ad revenue that way. Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence...or in this case, any evidence.

[OGinparadise]

Let's go back to step one:

Google's revenue is rising by what % a year?

Google's user base or searches are increasing by what % a year?

Is there a difference and what makes that difference?

Google's recent stock growth and revenue also match Google's highly publicizes Panda and Penguin updates. Or supposedly fighting "spam" but in reality also ruined a lot of small businesses. My educated guess is that Google is sending a lot less "free clicks" to other sites.

Cost per click can be brought down by a supply gut or a poor ROI for the advertiser.

>> In any case, the considerably more obvious and likely explanation is the one I think most people have tended to assume: google disambiguates terms automatically because it's what works in the 90% case.

In any case, the considerably more obvious and likely explanation is the one I think most people have tended to assume: Google makes sure that any algorithm changes (at least) don't hurt their Adwords business. That's their bread, butter and dessert.

[threeseed]

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.

[georgemcbay]

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"!

[revelation]

The biggest thing for me has been localization. If you happen to use a localized version of Google, it will heavily favor results in that language, and give you mostly crap when searching for stuff in a different language using the localized search machine (so pretty much all the time for programmers).

Thankfully you can still tell it to use Google.com and in english.

[protomyth]

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.

[DanBC]

> Google better be really careful because

Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people.

I used to use + often. We know that the + operator was rarely used, and most of those times it wasn't used correctly. (Of all searches, only 1 in 600 were correctly using the + operator.)

Being outside Google (and not able to see their data) is frustrating, but they have a lot of numbers and they do this stuff because they can show it helps most people.

[OGinparadise]

>>Sadly, you are in a minority. Google's results are excellent for most people.

Sadly, you are in a minority. Bing's results are excellent for most people. Slap a Google logo and I'm willing to bet that most people wouldn't tell the difference. It's the Google brand that is golden, at least so far. But lately people are talking and questioning their honesty.

[jmillikin]

Bing's own comparison site "bing it on" shows that most users prefer Google's results[1], even though the comparison uses results modified to favor Bing[2].

[1] http://blog.paulnshapiro.com/bingiton-google-wins/

[2] http://www.punditpress.com/2013/02/the-bing-challenge-yes-it...

[OGinparadise]

dear Googler, you made me waste a bit of time: trying to do that by using tweets isn't accurate for obvious reasons. Power user vs normal user, motivation to tweet, bias against Microsoft etc. The other post was confusing as hell, I couldn't make out his point. Absolutely no data, other than suggesting that the poll was rigged. It may very well be.

You may want to check this http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2013/04/... from http://searchengineland.com/users-prefer-google-even-when-15... It's impartial, afaik, and almost 70% like Bing results with the Google logo vs around 30% o Google results with the Bing logo. Amazing since that case shows that people liked the Bing results and had their preferred company's logo on Google. (Not sure if Bing had anything to do with that study though)

Either way, if Bing narrowed the preference to 10%-20%, it's a great feat. Personally I find Bing lacking on obscure terms but most people wouldn't care.

[DanBC]

Well, you missed the point widely.

In my sentence "Google's results are excellent for most people." I could have said "Modern web search engine results are excellent for most people" - I didn't because this is a discussion of how Google (and only Google) is failing for a number of people.

[wslh]

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

[Lost_BiomedE]

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

[comex]

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]

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]

I'm pretty sure that more than just a couple people work on search at Google. ;)

[Sven7]

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]

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.

[Sven7]

Your comment highlights the problem. When people think search they think Google. Search is bigger than that and Google is in a way through its success and utility, limiting people's imagination when they think about search.

Just look at their menu bar...images, videos, flights, blogs, shopping, books, patents, apps.

Is that it?

Not to mention random. So we just sit around waiting for some benevolent god in Mountain View to say, you know what now let the mortals have...recipes.

If they want to expand that list to the infinite domains it should be covering, it is never going to happen with the resources they have. They need to open the index to tap into its full potential.

[magicalist]

I doubt any "index" exists in the way the words indicates. It's likely highly custom for how it's accessed. What would an API for that look like? Do you want to just be able to do random regexes (that would be awesome...I miss code search)? Do you just want a disk sitting somewhere with all the internet on it so that you can run custom programs on it?

Identifying what a recipe looks like and then providing a search interface that can figure out which of the millions of variations of some soup recipe is what a person is looking for and is more authoritative than others (and not some blog spam with minor (but random) alterations, or written by an amateur with no business in the kitchen) is a hard problem. Crawling isn't really the hard part. It takes a lot of hardware and time, but then you have all this data...that's when the hard part starts.

I'm interested in what others think a useful "index" API would look like, though.

[DanBC]

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.

[taliesinb]

It's probably smaller than we all think. Google has a lot of products, even after graveyarding a large number of them.

[taliesinb]

This is a great point. Gabe Newell makes the same point about the gaming industry: the short-term view is that gaming is about selling units. The long-term view is that gaming is a cultural activity that can be monetized in an almost infinite number of ways.

[new299]

Perhaps, but the model as also been tried and failed (Inktomi).

[joe_the_user]

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

[ako]

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...