I consider myself good at searching, in fact I’ve written search engines.
Here is an example of a bad search. On Mental Floss I had read a reference to Colonel Sanders inviting J Edgar Hoover to his birthday party, but Hoover declined because of something Sanders had done in the past. So I searched for: colonel sanders criminal record
What does Google give me? colonel sanders background. No mention of the word “criminal” in the first 3 hits that I checked. That is really what’s wrong with Google, give me what I typed, not what you “think” I want.
And that’s what I’m talking about. Suppose you added “author” or “book” to your search; on a search like that, Google is just as likely to assume you didn’t really want sites with “book” or “author” (or “Did you mean ‘Arthur’?”). They make it easier for all the fucktwats out there but they simultaneously take away the functionality for people who know how to do searches.
As for the people that say Cad you’re over reacting because “mystery shopper” doesn’t show up until the second page (on my search there were a couple near the bottom of the first page), they miss the entire point. I don’t want may search to pull up 1,300,000,000 pages that may be tangentally related to what I want. If there are exactly 32,619 pages with “mystery diners” “fake” on it, then I want those pages and nothing more.
The other day I was searching for information on a shooting star I had seen. Google saw fit to come up with results containing the word “asteroid” when I searched for “meteor”, despite the fact that they’re completely different things. Chances are there was no useful information to be found, but if there was Google didn’t make things very easy.
At other times it’s very useful when you’re not quite sure of the wording, for example if you’re looking for a quote. Perhaps some way to vary Google’s “helpfulness” would be useful.
Thanks for that example. It’s helping me see what you guys are talking about.
What I’d really love to see is examples where the information is established by independent means to be available online somewhere (in a way accessible to general web search engines) but finding it through Google is inordinately difficult. Not what I asked for explicitly, of course, so I don’t mean to say you didn’t provide an example of what I asked for. You did.
32,619 pages? Are you going to read all of them? If not–if you’re actually going to just look at one, maybe two pages of links–then why are you concerned about the content of the other 32618 or more?
From this I conclude there is no information on a criminal record for colonel sanders available through Google. I guess you’d prefer it if Google were to actually say so explicitly though. I can understand that. I just kind of take it as given–but I can see that the results could be considered ambiguous on this point.
It would be good if we could see, independently, whether the information is actually there to be found.
A very shaky inference, given the way Google now behaves.
And it used to say so explicitly, by the simple expedient of returning zero results. The fact that it now does not do that, but just decides for itself to ignore some of your search terms, is why many of us no longer trust it.
Yes the info typically is there, sometimes it’s something found previously or sometimes it’s something eventually found after much work. One of the reasons it’s difficult to give you many examples is that google searches are frequent enough that they don’t typically stand out enough to commit to memory, but the pattern is definitely noticed.
The searches that are problematic require far more than viewing 1 or 2 links, I will go through 10 pages of links looking for stuff
A smaller set of relevant pages also provides a smaller set of irrelevant pages due to search items that can then be eliminated with the minus, thus iteratively getting closer to the desired information
A smaller set of pages based on the specific terms required increases the chances that the first page will contain the desired information
Not skeptical, just incomprehending. This is probably related to the fact that it’s difficult for me to imagine a topic about which I would find a 10 page list of google links to be worth going through.
I’m not sure it’s shaky. One of the first five links is usually sufficient for my purpose in searching, and relevance generally drops the lower down the complete list of links I go.* So, if none of the first two pages or so are sufficient for my purpose, the information probably is not accessible to google.
*Generally in the sense that there’s some small number n such that in every case if I look only at every nth link each successive looked-at link will be less relevant than the one I looked at last.
That’s actually the article ctrl-z already read–the one that sent him off on the search in the first place.
I want to bet a hundred dollars that there are no relevant google results to be had on that topic–but my wife would kill me and “relevant google results” is probably too hard to define for betting purposes.
The fact that it is usually sufficient for your purposes is quite beside the point of whether it is sufficient generally. Not everybody has your search needs. Today’s Google does indeed make it easier for casual users to find commonly sought information, without them having to give much care and attention to teh construction of their search. However, it make sit much harder, if not downright impossible, for people to find certain sorts of more esoteric information, even if they are prepared to put a lot of effort into constructing their query.
But I feel I am repeating myself, and repeating what RaftPeople and others have also been telling you. You have been given specific examples, but you reject them on the grounds that you personally have not had a problem. Just because you have not encountered a problem, it does not follow that there is not a problem. Have you ever had ebola? No? Does that mean it does not exist? Why are you finding this so hard to grasp?
And yes it is a shaky inference. I would go so far as to say (on the basis of doing many Google searches back when it responded consistently and did what was asked) that, nine times out of ten, it is a false inference. Very often, the information is there somewhere, but not in the most popular sources that Google now insists on serving up at the top of its list. You used to be able to winnow it out. Now you can’t.
That’s not even close to the grounds I’ve given for my reactions–and the reactions weren’t even “rejection” but more along the lines of clarifying what I’d meant to ask for in the first place.
What would really clear this all up for me, to reiterate, would be examples of searches for which the information is definitely available through google, but for which the required search terms are somehow arcane, complicated, or nonintuitive in the way you guys have been describing–or for which there are no good search terms and you must instead sift through many pages of results.
It would also help me if I knew what kind of tasks you guys are talking about for which it is reliably relevant to look at many pages of results.
