The loss of the + functionality still hurts. I know there is a way around it (which doesn’t always work), but it requires more typing and is far from as easy.
Google also seems to miss the freedom Tripod gave its users to make flashy things come and go. I still haven’t found a way to completely turn off the useless web preview that takes up a third of the screen. If I’m some malformed fanboy looking for the best brony site, maybe it will be useful. Maybe. But most of my searches are for information, text, words … things that don’t show up very well in their preview. That really cuts to the lowest common denominator (and apologies to the two Very Special Snowflake Dopers who do use it and are offended at my disdain for them) and underscores a few of the points made above–search results are becoming geared/marketed towards the same demographic as Google/Yahoo/Wiki answers.
What? That makes no sense. If people don’t want to use Google search, competition opens up and DDG gets an opportunity to steal users. That’s a smaller userbase for Google. Google waters its brand down enough, and enough users will leave until Google takes a sharp hit in its revenue stream. Why wouldn’t Google listen to complaints about its search? Arguing that Google won’t listen to a very small market segment is one thing, but you’re responding to the bullshit of “you’re not a customer, you’re a product; getting things for free means you can’t complain.” Either your response wholly missed the point or your MBA is from Clown College.
What’s wrong with Bing? For basic text search, maybe the results are a bit less helpful than Google’s, especially if you’re searching for something obscure. But its video and image search is excellent-- in fact, Google has completely ripped-off Bing’s image search result page design.
Since I’m arguing that Google won’t listen to a very small market segment and has in fact made the business decision that the cost to service them is more than the costs of their taking their searches elsewhere, I’m not sure how to make that any clearer.
Since I’ve never claimed to have a MBA, perhaps it’s not my words that are the problem.
(As an aside, that was supposed to sound light-hearted, no harshness intended)
Right, your response is an arguable position (particularly whether that market segment drives other traffic). I may be mistaken, but I thought you were responding to the “red herring” that often comes up here: you’re the product, not the customer, and since you’re getting something for free you have no right to complain.
Google’s success was built on making their searches better than the competition. The complaint at hand seems to be that they’re screwing that up–that it’s becoming harder to find what you’re looking for. Google should listen to people on the cutting edge of search–they’re the ones who know how to articulate their problems. Google makes their search weak enough and Facebook or the Next Google will eviscerate them. It seems that Google et al somewhat forget that they replaced giants. They are not safe.
I’m with Frylock. A few days ago I read an article on MSNBC that I thought my parents’ would find interesting. I tried to pull it up on their PC but it was off the front page. So I used the Bing search bar on the MSNBC page to search for what I remembered being the relevant words in the title of the story. Bing couldn’t find it - a story that had been on the front page within the previous 24 hours could not be found in a search of the MSNBC website by Bing.
I put the same words into Google and it was the 3rd link listed. (FWIW, the story that was found was the same story hosted on a different news site.)
Google has always had this thing where they can’t find something that works and stick with it. They’ve constantly got to be tweaking. This makes sense in the software world, where you are trying to get people to buy the latest thing. I don’t get the logic on websites. I’ve never known anyone who keeps using a product because it keeps changing–it’s always in spite of the changes.
Oh, and it is very possible to be everything to everyone–it just involves getting out of the mindset that you can only provide one product. It’s like how Coke for some reason has problems with competing with itself when it comes out with a new flavor–for some businessy reason I don’t understand, it’s better to leave out the dissatisfied people rather than make a product for them.
I do know one thing, though. If some upstart does beat out Google, they’re just going to pull a YouTube and buy it out–they have no reason to innovate on their own. Though maybe that’s just Facebook’s strategy.
I noticed this just before coming here using google. I usually use, and have better luck with Google advanced search.
I have two theories for this. First they dumbed up google for people who are bad at searching. Second I think there might be some kind of results war going on. The old search for X with Bing and get 20 hits, search with us and get 20,000. In searching more isn’t necessarily better. However, I just now searched for a girl I haven’t seen in a few years and got only 20 hits with bing and 21,157 with google. I have a black belt in Google-Fu and was able to find her better on google despite the fact that even with quotes, it tried to change her first and last name, sometimes both. I only found her sister and mom on bing. Google advanced search worked the best with 93 results. OK, most of the sites would require me to pay to find anything out. but even so I gathered enough to figure out she had married again and find a picture of her. Bing missed several pages.
If I’m seriously searching I use Dogpile which searches several search engines at once. The down side of this is you get all the junk pages from all the search engines, but it is a good place to start
How many pages in do you get “terminal velocity” results without that exact phrase? I’ve gone five pages down and haven’t seen one yet.
I typically only look at the first page of results when I do a google search. I can remember a few times I went on to the second page. But I don’t think I have ever gone to the third or greater page. It is difficult to imagine why I ever would. Do you guys typically, or often, go through multiple pages of a google search? If the first page or two aren’t good, isn’t your best strategy simply to refine your search? And if the first page or two are fine and you just want to look at a whole lot of links, I guess I’m just curious to know just exactly what you’re doing such that pages and pages of links are actually relevant. I can imagine some special cases, but it can’t be typical!?
If I’m searching for “terminal velocity,” I don’t even know why I’d be looking at more than the first three links, much less pages.
I run into problems most frequently with model numbers of old equipment where placement of dashes spaces, and periods are important. As an example I just did a search on “45.452-6” (in quotes)
If I page forward, finally on page 5 I get “45.452 -6” which is closer, but still doesn’t earn them a stogie. Turning on Verbatim doesn’t help.
Given the made up nature of my example, it’s highly possible that there are no exact matches. But if that’s the case, I want it to return ‘No results found for “45.452-6”’.
So I understand Google trolling for the lowest common denomenator, but why take out the functionality for the people that know exactly what they want or are willing to do a second search for “shoppers” instead of “diners” if the first search was insufficient or for searches where it really is “illudium” and not “illuminate”
How many pages of google search links are you looking at til you get “illuminate”? I just looked at the first five (ETA: Strike that. Ten.) pages and every link is about “illudium,” not “illuminate.”
If you’ve got five (ten!) pages worth of links to “illudium”-related pages, what are you doing such that you need even more links?
Again, it’s my understanding is that if it included punctuation in its indexing, the index would be much larger (and hence it would require more resources to store and it would probably be slower to use). For instance, if you wanted the search terms “end” and “end.” and “end,” and “end;” to each be a separate entry, that’s four times as much storage as just storing “end”.
Presumably they could do some kind of post-processing afterwards (e.g. do some filtering on the search results), but where would be the fun in that?
Well, OK, but AFAIK Google (and probably all or most other search engines) has always ignored punctuation. This is really not a case of the worsening and dumbing down of Google search that is what most people (including me) have been complaining about in this thread. Furthermore, I can see Google’s point of view on this one. Including punctuation would surely vastly increase the size of their index, and the number of people like you, to whom it matters, must be minuscule.
Have you not noticed what people are saying about the “search bubble”? A major part of the problem is that different people often get different results for the same search terms these days. (Great if you are looking for a local business, or some such; not so good if you are trying to gage the international consensus on some issue.) You can’t (any more) judge other people’s experience of Google by your own. Saint Cad may be seeing something quite different from what you see.
Yes and the provided links on the topic indicate that the problem turns out to be much more minor than a lot of people think, doesn’t in fact occur that often, and when it does, it’s basically okay because Google tells you at the very top how many of the results are “personalized.” (I got six “personalized” links for “illudium.” Did St Cad get that many, fewer, or more? Did they all end up on his first page or two for some reason? Were they all “illuminate” instead of “illudium?”)
So then… if the punctuation thing isn’t bothering people, I’m still in need of examples of clearly bad google searches, or cases where another (general web search) engine does clearly better.
