Yes, yes, yes. I have been meaning to write this very blog post for years with examples just like this.
There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless.
The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier does not always appear, and you click through to a page that is useless without knowing it.
My habit has become to immediately ctrl-f on the resulting page and look for my terms so I don't waste my time.
Further problems:
- "allinsite:" is just a toss-up whether it is respected or not. Who knows why, but it does not fix this problem.
- "quoted strings", such as for programming or naming conventions, are completely ignored and are useless.
- there is no "not" operator, which is desperately needed.[1]
The only function that actually works as advertised is the site: prefix which limits searches to that particular website. I won't be surprised when they break this too, because it's not producing enough search-result-revenue.
I am not a teenaged kid searching for Justin Bieber and perfectly happy with whatever "relevant" or "related" results pop up. I am a professional. I am an engineer. I need tools that work, and google is shit as a search engine.
This happens to me frequently. I've also noticed that sometimes the "Did you mean [this]?" or "Search instead for [this]" don't show up anymore, which can be a big problem. As an example, it's difficult to find information on the company "Amazone" because Google insists on correcting it to Amazon. Usually putting things in quotes fixes it, but it's annoying when I know what I want to search for and Google keeps assuming I want something else.
Except that in 99% of cases, Google is correct. The pure volume of people mistyping Amazon is good enough reason to autocorrect "Amazone." You know what you want to search for. So tell google what you want, "Amazone."
I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.
If you are logged in to Google, and search for Amazone, then click the "search instead for Amazone" option, Google should remember your preference the next time you search.
Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google.
And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technologies Google had years to perfect (in addition to solving problems like storage, search logic and bandwidth management).
You are not correct. Apache Foundation, electron/chromium & elastic are the open source components of google. meme-explorer is the paradigm but was funded by drape/jpl_nasa so work was suspended on it.
heirarchical crawl index and DNS rebuild(or similar model) will lead to search platform and fix discovery, monopoly and monetization.
note that Google has solved a HUGE problem, but their task is now impossible. You can't simply use a textbook and some booleans and quotations(which I am not sure they even respect) to deliver results for a billion people.
Individuals and the market will calibrate their own results.
Alas, it’s 2016 and there’s still no serious competitor to Google.
Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow.
And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.
In terms of results from crawling, I would consider Bing a "serious" competitor, although still a distant second. They are well-funded, used in ~30% of searches in the US, and don't look like they're going away anytime soon. It would be sad if they did because Google would then be a total monopoly.
Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.
Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and start with a ?, like
"?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would love to get any feedback.
I don't understand this article, particularly this footnote:
>OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it!
That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to what he's looking for. What am I missing? He's saying the first results are worse, but they are better results. They return the actual app he's looking for, where he could presumably find info on retina support, not some completely different app's lack of retina. All of the links in the second screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for.
> All of the links in the second screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for
In fact, if you look at the results with "deluge.app" and "retina" in quotes, there are no results that he would be looking for.
I think this article misses its own point: it's not that the results are worse, it's that what he actually wanted was for google to tell him there were no results, not to realize there were no results and so expand his search for him.
There are two choices that google can make in this type of situation, show you that there are no results for your search terms (helpful in this situation but not when there are obvious synonyms that do have results ("help" vs "aid" example in the article)) or google could expand your search to include synonyms or not contain all terms (helpful when there are lots of useful results close to your terms in search space, not so helpful when you're looking for something very very specific).
I'd imagine it's incredibly hard to tell the difference between these situations with just a few words as a query, but if I had to bet, I'd guess they probably hit some useful level a large portion of the time. It's not clear the problem is universally solvable, however, and going back to add quotes to terms is annoying to type. We're probably never going to get the beloved + operator back, so how about just making verbatim search much quicker to toggle, google?
(I'd settle for a more consistently triggered "Search instead for [original search term]" at the top of the results)
I'm the original author of the blog post; if you'll allow me to clarify. I apologize for the misleading footnote - I believe it gives the impression that this isn't the correct search result when it is.
"The" post that I wanted to be first place had the perfect summary in Google, discussed deluge on OS X, talked about the lack of retina for a few different apps, and explicitly mentioned a few without retina support but did not outright include deluge in that list of apps without retina support. It was the most-relevant result in that it actually discussed the topics being searched for. It was, for all intents and purposes, the correct result that should have been returned - only pedantically it did not provide a point-blank answer to whether or not deluge itself was retina-ready.
I agree with you 100%, the results in the first image which do include all the search terms are more relevant than the results in the second search. But Google, for some reason, chose to prioritize the results that did not have all the search terms over those that did. Now from the results in the first image, the first of the displayed results that did use all the search terms (i.e. did not say "Missing: deluge") was the most-relevant of all the results that were obtained from either listing (important pedantic note: whether it actually answered my original question or not does not detract from the fact that it was the most relevant. Because the other links neither answered my original question nor were relevant to it.)
I think a comment by "Robert" from the blog post (if I may re-post it here), best summarizes my disappointment:
Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates” is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a random time that I saw fit?
Regardless of whether or not the suggestion for potential soulmate ends up working out, the fact remains, you don't say "I have a result for your search query, but let's look at these definitely irrelevant results first"
If you want to over-analyze this, let's look at the "blurbs" returned by Google for the search results:
1) Deluge's main download page; blurb: open-source cross-platform torrent client. Site includes screenshots, FAQ, and community forums. MISSING: RETINA
3) Installing/Mac OS X: A deluge package is available which works on Mac. MISSING: RETINA
4) From Linux to OS X: Meet your new apps: OS X Mount Lion ships with an app similar to AppX and AppY ..... [sic] It has one notable shortcoming: no retina support .... [sic] There are plenty of great Bittorrent clients on Linux - Deluge, KTorrent, Transmission, etc.
Of these four results, only one specifically talks about Deluge.app and Retina. It's the fourth result. Based off these four blurbs, which do you think is the right page to click on with the highest probability of answering my question? 1) The product main page which I know, thanks to Google, does not have the word "retina" anywhere, 2) the product download page, which I know, thanks to Google despite the completely useless blurb, does not contain the word "retina" anywhere, 3) instructions for installing on Mac, which thanks to Google, I know does not contain the word "retina" anywhere, or 4) a page discussing a variety of apps available on OS X, including explicitly by name, Deluge, which also talks about the retina support of one or more of the aforementioned apps?
I clicked on number 4. A page that talks about Deluge and other torrent clients that are available on OS X and lambasts an (unknown from the blurb) app for not having retina support would ideally be the page that would contain specific information on whether or not Deluge has retina support. It didn't provide the direct answer I was looking for. But it was a hell of a lot more relevant than the first three results, and Google knew it.
Addendum:
Oh, and about deluge.app not being in quotes: that's a lesson learned the hard way. Mac apps unfortunately do not have "unique" names. Pages. Numbers. Deluge. etc. People often append ".app" to clarify their meaning for SEO purposes, and I know that Google indexes "foo.bar" (sans quotes) as "foo bar" (again, sans quotes). Ironically, the only "word" of the original search query that could have been logically dropped is "app". But odds are that a post discussing Mac apps would contain the word "app" or "apps" somewhere. It's not fair to put "deluge.app" in quotes to provide a counterexample, because I knowingly and deliberately did not place it in quotes in the first place, because that's the one term that I do not require to be present verbatim.
Also, this is just the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back." I run into this problem many times on a daily basis. This is just the concrete example that triggered the post in question, and for which I was able to obtain screenshots of the different variations so that the situation could be properly documented.
That's a pretty good point! I missed that footnote altogether. To me, it sure seems like his issue is more that of SEO than necessarily Google being wrong.
Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not about how to arrange my junk in a particular way.
Google revolutionary approach to indexing the web was that it started to use the amount of hyperlinks to a page as a measure of its importance. Since then, they have a strong "internet bias". If something is more present in the internet than in the "real" world, it would appear first.
Searching for "Apple" used to display just pages about the company, not the fruit (even when the company was almost out of business). Searching for "samba" would display just pages about mounting windows filesystems in Linux, not the most important musical genre of a whole country.
Nowadays they improved their algorithms and this bias isn't so strong, but it always important to remember that what is important in the cyberspace isn't necessary important for the whole world.
I don't see this case as a particular problem. "People wanting to learn about goats" might actually be in the minority. Most people actually googling that word may in fact be looking for some alternative meaning because someone used it in some other sense and they didn't understand, so they Googled. And then clicked Urban Dictionary, voting it up.
I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product?
You got unlucky. G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time) is really popular slang at the moment for describing athletes, fashion, actors, etc. and people are undoubtedly searching for that term more than they are looking for the wikipedia page for the animal.
To be fair, when I search I get a huge Knowledge Graph result on the right with a picture of the animal.
Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this.
What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat:
I get Wikipedia as the top result. Maybe Google is making a guess about your preference based on your history? Try the search in incognito/private mode and see.
I've long given up on Google outside of the anglosphere. I travel a lot. Location services are enabled on my phone and laptop yet Google still wants to serve up results from the US. I've had to be very careful with how I use Maps since the name of a dutch city or street just might share the same name as some bar in middle America.
I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some results take me back to a tour company in central Paris even if they have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
This has forced me to go back to search aggregators like DDG. I miss the old Google. DDG can be a little too broad with the results and then I have to load it with filters where old Google would kind of get it right away.
I got quite tired of Google only showing me local (Brazilian) stores when I search for the name of a product in English. Or completely translating my search queries when I get some compiling error on libraries.
Good thing is that with DDG, I can simply use the !g command, and Google won't know I'm making the query from Brazil, and won't be able to localize it at all.
There are lots of problems that I've noticed anymore too. One that I always find is the utter uselessness of searching for a phone number anymore. There are a million pages that simply list random numbers. That's not useful AT ALL.
Another that I've more recently noticed is conversions on mobile. I went from being able to type any approximation of "ounces" "to/in/-" "pounds" and getting a number right away to having to click on one of the results to get the number. It seems like backward from Google's normal MO so I don't really understand why they'd do it but I definitely have consistently had problems with that especially more recently.
You could never find useful results for a phone number, except for businesses. Searching for a small local business's phone number brought up their page for me.
Yeah this bites me nearly every day. I can only assume that they have some data that this helps 60%-80% of their users in some way, and they are optimizing for the common case rather than the uncommon case.
Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as a company or its policies.
It could also just be that they [incorrectly] assume their users are dumb, their algorithms are smart, and have forgotten what made them big in the first place. IIRC, besides PageRank, one of their original usability improvements was AND-ing query terms by default instead of OR-ing by default like their competition.
In some cases I think it would be useful to see a count of results with one of the terms removed, but there's no way it should override _my_ search terms. That just seems broken.
A friend had to chance his product name, because Google wouldnt stop suggesting porn. You googled his product and instead you found porn. It was not really related, and the term was as innocent as possible in it self, but well google thought and still thinks you want porn.
Duckduckgo has a safe filter that blocks porn and a few other things from showing up in the search results that works pretty well, you can decide to take it off at any time too. They have the same kind of filter for looking for country specific results.
I've developed the habit of just asking Google questions instead of crafting something to feed how I think the algorithm works. I also don't worry about ranking, just as long as something is in the top 10.
Does deluge bittorrent support retina display?
The 7th link result for that question has the text "Deluge has updated their program to support the Retina Display" in it's text summary. That's good enough for me.
I think that some of this reaction is just resistance to 'relearning' how to search. Whereas before you developed techniques to make your queries more 'computer like', now you can revert to something more like natural language.
It would still be nice to have an 'advanced' search mode that was more strict, allowed advanced features, and still took advantage of Google's talent and infrastructure.
I have this problem all the time. I type {movie/book/cd name} illegal free download -price -buy -purchase and click search. Google knows what I want. Everyone knows what I want. Yet time and again the first hundreds of results are for non-free stores where I can purchase the item. Stupid Google!
His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually saying that Twitter's app has no retina support, and Deluge is mentioned elsewhere on the page, with nothing about retina support.
I don't think that Google accepts +term any longer. They switched several years ago to requiring "term" with quotes. Presumably this was because they wanted to make searches for Google+ names easier. For a while I think they gave a warning, but it seems like they've stopped doing that now.
Edit: Wait, you work for Google, right? Am I the one that's lost? Did they switch back to supporting +term?
Yeah, in my experience the problem is not about Google ignoring search keywords. It is just that their recent updates made it much less apparent that what I'm looking for is not in their index. Their new algorithm seems to drop keywords until it can show me some results that are barely relevant and makes me think that I have to keep tweaking my keywords until I can find what I'm looking for, even if it doesn't exist on the web.
Each similar search Google can avoid re-running saves them compute resources and therefore money. Google's as-you-type search suggestions encourage some significant percentage of users performing a query to accept a search suggestion (or suggestion that aggregates multiple searches) that match exactly with searches that were already run. Google can just re-return the results.
The autocorrection and removal of terms accomplishes the same thing.
While I think these measures may be partially to help users, I think they're actually mostly cost-saving measures on Google's part.
I disagree with you. In the query "deluge retina", "deluge" is definitely the more important bit. After all you're looking for deluge and are hoping to find it with support for retina. Otherwise you would've written something like "torrent client retina".
Now this is where a bit of guess work comes in but I'd say Google correctly deduces there is no such thing. Even the best result for both terms just talks about some app not supporting retina, and from the looks of it does help with what other client you might want to use if switching to OSX when you were previously a deluge user on Linux (possibly when dealing with retina). But that's not deluge. That's a useless result considering your primary intent was finding deluge. So Google chooses to give you results that might get you what you want over results that (correctly) only disappoint explaining there is no such thing. So in the first three results Google correctly decides that, to get you a relevant result at all it needs to omit the "retina" to get you results that might possibly get you what you want - deluge despite not having retina support - over just giving you the results that are relevant but definitely won't get you what you want. Your query had no results that would get you what you wanted so Google tried to alter the query and see if it could get you something useful anyway.
I think Google trying to give you results that might be hits instead of giving you disappointment in the first place is very sensible behavior.
Any speculation on why they'd want to do this? It seems clearly better for the consumer if wikipedia shows up at the top anytime you google a word/phrase that appears in wikipedia. Do they make money on the results that are showing up higher?
Here's a thought: maybe the shift in the index to display realtime website updates and factor in social network inputs have ruined their ranking system? Or at the very least, forced it to approximate results rather than be precise about it?
Maybe google has become like robocop receiving 100+ prime directives. All these low quality, noisy inputs are simply driving the engine bonkers?
I find myself using the "verbatim" search option all the time, which is hidden one menu-layer deep in the "search tools" drop-down, behind the "All Results" button.
It helps but I've noticed this trend of google search working against the user too.
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
There is not a single day that goes by that I am not searching for something specific and particular in google and am treated to pages and pages of search results that are missing at least one of the terms, thus rendering the results useless.
The worst part is, the strikethrough "missing: search term" identifier does not always appear, and you click through to a page that is useless without knowing it.
My habit has become to immediately ctrl-f on the resulting page and look for my terms so I don't waste my time.
Further problems:
- "allinsite:" is just a toss-up whether it is respected or not. Who knows why, but it does not fix this problem.
- "quoted strings", such as for programming or naming conventions, are completely ignored and are useless.
- there is no "not" operator, which is desperately needed.[1]
The only function that actually works as advertised is the site: prefix which limits searches to that particular website. I won't be surprised when they break this too, because it's not producing enough search-result-revenue.
I am not a teenaged kid searching for Justin Bieber and perfectly happy with whatever "relevant" or "related" results pop up. I am a professional. I am an engineer. I need tools that work, and google is shit as a search engine.
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
[+] [-] stephaniepier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|10 years ago|reply
I don't see how you can complain when you have the solution to the problem, don't use it, and are an incredibly niche (<1%) case.
[+] [-] theseatoms|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixermark|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romaniv|10 years ago|reply
And there will not be any time soon. Writing an efficient crawler for what we call the "modern" web is not something a small or even median-size company can pull off. Google enjoys a tremendous competitive advantage: people specifically optimize webpages for what it can and cannot do. So any newcomer to the field will have to replicate tons of technologies Google had years to perfect (in addition to solving problems like storage, search logic and bandwidth management).
[+] [-] hotcool|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|10 years ago|reply
heirarchical crawl index and DNS rebuild(or similar model) will lead to search platform and fix discovery, monopoly and monetization.
note that Google has solved a HUGE problem, but their task is now impossible. You can't simply use a textbook and some booleans and quotations(which I am not sure they even respect) to deliver results for a billion people.
Individuals and the market will calibrate their own results.
[+] [-] ErikAugust|10 years ago|reply
A novel solution could be designed and implemented by a small company but no one dares.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|10 years ago|reply
Eh. I switched my default to Duck Duck Go and I'm pretty happy with it. Not quite as magical as Google was in its heyday but then neither is Google. Set up keywords for your searches ("g" for Google, "b" for Bing etc.) and they're all just a keystroke away anyhow.
And if you're too lazy to set up your own custom searches or you're using a borrowed machine, Duck Duck Go has some slick built-in "bang" searches: "!imdb aronofsky", "!msdn system.diagnostics" and so on.
[+] [-] solveforall|10 years ago|reply
Though DuckDuckGo does do its own indexing, AFAIK it is limited and they mostly rely on other search engines (Bing and Yandex most probably). So it's more a meta-search engine not quite in the category of Google.
Today, I just posted a Show HN for a search engine and feed reader I've been working on. It also has "bangs" except they are called activation codes and start with a ?, like "?jq appendto". It's easy to add your own "?" handler, as it doesn't require any approval to do so. I'm just getting started so I would love to get any feedback.
Link to the Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11174127
[+] [-] isleyaardvark|10 years ago|reply
>OK, confession time: the article linked to in the fourth result – the one that says “no retina support […] Deluge” actually talks about another app’s lack of retina support on OS X, but just go with it!
That's the result he's using to say the results are worse, that that result should be higher, but says in the footnote that's not even a result relevant to what he's looking for. What am I missing? He's saying the first results are worse, but they are better results. They return the actual app he's looking for, where he could presumably find info on retina support, not some completely different app's lack of retina. All of the links in the second screenshot are wildly irrelevant to what he's looking for.
[+] [-] magicalist|10 years ago|reply
In fact, if you look at the results with "deluge.app" and "retina" in quotes, there are no results that he would be looking for.
I think this article misses its own point: it's not that the results are worse, it's that what he actually wanted was for google to tell him there were no results, not to realize there were no results and so expand his search for him.
There are two choices that google can make in this type of situation, show you that there are no results for your search terms (helpful in this situation but not when there are obvious synonyms that do have results ("help" vs "aid" example in the article)) or google could expand your search to include synonyms or not contain all terms (helpful when there are lots of useful results close to your terms in search space, not so helpful when you're looking for something very very specific).
I'd imagine it's incredibly hard to tell the difference between these situations with just a few words as a query, but if I had to bet, I'd guess they probably hit some useful level a large portion of the time. It's not clear the problem is universally solvable, however, and going back to add quotes to terms is annoying to type. We're probably never going to get the beloved + operator back, so how about just making verbatim search much quicker to toggle, google?
(I'd settle for a more consistently triggered "Search instead for [original search term]" at the top of the results)
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|10 years ago|reply
"The" post that I wanted to be first place had the perfect summary in Google, discussed deluge on OS X, talked about the lack of retina for a few different apps, and explicitly mentioned a few without retina support but did not outright include deluge in that list of apps without retina support. It was the most-relevant result in that it actually discussed the topics being searched for. It was, for all intents and purposes, the correct result that should have been returned - only pedantically it did not provide a point-blank answer to whether or not deluge itself was retina-ready.
I agree with you 100%, the results in the first image which do include all the search terms are more relevant than the results in the second search. But Google, for some reason, chose to prioritize the results that did not have all the search terms over those that did. Now from the results in the first image, the first of the displayed results that did use all the search terms (i.e. did not say "Missing: deluge") was the most-relevant of all the results that were obtained from either listing (important pedantic note: whether it actually answered my original question or not does not detract from the fact that it was the most relevant. Because the other links neither answered my original question nor were relevant to it.)
I think a comment by "Robert" from the blog post (if I may re-post it here), best summarizes my disappointment:
Imagine if I told you I have someone who might be the perfect soulmate for you, but unfortunately because the pool of candidates for “perfect soulmates” is so small, I’m also including people that are maybe compatible with you or maybe not – a kind and thoughtful act, on my behalf…. And then I proceed to introduce you to these latters while holding back the perfect match until a random time that I saw fit?
Regardless of whether or not the suggestion for potential soulmate ends up working out, the fact remains, you don't say "I have a result for your search query, but let's look at these definitely irrelevant results first"
If you want to over-analyze this, let's look at the "blurbs" returned by Google for the search results:
1) Deluge's main download page; blurb: open-source cross-platform torrent client. Site includes screenshots, FAQ, and community forums. MISSING: RETINA
2) Download - Deluge. Latest release <url here>. Release... <link to ubuntu.png here> Deluge.app. MISSING: RETINA
3) Installing/Mac OS X: A deluge package is available which works on Mac. MISSING: RETINA
4) From Linux to OS X: Meet your new apps: OS X Mount Lion ships with an app similar to AppX and AppY ..... [sic] It has one notable shortcoming: no retina support .... [sic] There are plenty of great Bittorrent clients on Linux - Deluge, KTorrent, Transmission, etc.
Of these four results, only one specifically talks about Deluge.app and Retina. It's the fourth result. Based off these four blurbs, which do you think is the right page to click on with the highest probability of answering my question? 1) The product main page which I know, thanks to Google, does not have the word "retina" anywhere, 2) the product download page, which I know, thanks to Google despite the completely useless blurb, does not contain the word "retina" anywhere, 3) instructions for installing on Mac, which thanks to Google, I know does not contain the word "retina" anywhere, or 4) a page discussing a variety of apps available on OS X, including explicitly by name, Deluge, which also talks about the retina support of one or more of the aforementioned apps?
I clicked on number 4. A page that talks about Deluge and other torrent clients that are available on OS X and lambasts an (unknown from the blurb) app for not having retina support would ideally be the page that would contain specific information on whether or not Deluge has retina support. It didn't provide the direct answer I was looking for. But it was a hell of a lot more relevant than the first three results, and Google knew it.
Addendum:
Oh, and about deluge.app not being in quotes: that's a lesson learned the hard way. Mac apps unfortunately do not have "unique" names. Pages. Numbers. Deluge. etc. People often append ".app" to clarify their meaning for SEO purposes, and I know that Google indexes "foo.bar" (sans quotes) as "foo bar" (again, sans quotes). Ironically, the only "word" of the original search query that could have been logically dropped is "app". But odds are that a post discussing Mac apps would contain the word "app" or "apps" somewhere. It's not fair to put "deluge.app" in quotes to provide a counterexample, because I knowingly and deliberately did not place it in quotes in the first place, because that's the one term that I do not require to be present verbatim.
Also, this is just the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back." I run into this problem many times on a daily basis. This is just the concrete example that triggered the post in question, and for which I was able to obtain screenshots of the different variations so that the situation could be properly documented.
[+] [-] zodPod|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbrown451|10 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/webhp?q=goat#safe=on&q=goat
Yes a crude Urban Dictionary definition was above the Wikipedia definition. Maybe they think they know my sense of humor and pop culture, but I really wanted to learn about actual goats, the animals, because my 2 year old daughter enjoys them so much at the petting zoo. Not about how to arrange my junk in a particular way.
[+] [-] neves|10 years ago|reply
Searching for "Apple" used to display just pages about the company, not the fruit (even when the company was almost out of business). Searching for "samba" would display just pages about mounting windows filesystems in Linux, not the most important musical genre of a whole country.
Nowadays they improved their algorithms and this bias isn't so strong, but it always important to remember that what is important in the cyberspace isn't necessary important for the whole world.
[+] [-] dheera|10 years ago|reply
However, there's a particularly interesting case:
https://www.google.com/#q=tsla
I don't know about you (Google personalizes results to some degree) but the first result I see is Yahoo Finance. Google Finance is second. Why is Google promoting Yahoo over their own product?
[+] [-] roymurdock|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solveforall|10 years ago|reply
Generally, I think that the number of people who want the Urban Dictionary result is higher than the number of people looking for the animal, so it's hard to fault Google for this.
What would be ideal is to have something like DuckDuckGo's disambiguation bar that included the Urban Dictionary definition of goat:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goat&ia=meanings
Unfortunately, it's not there right now.
[+] [-] Lagged2Death|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yardie|10 years ago|reply
I think someone is buying or gaming search results. When I'm in Paris some results take me back to a tour company in central Paris even if they have nothing to do with what I'm looking for.
This has forced me to go back to search aggregators like DDG. I miss the old Google. DDG can be a little too broad with the results and then I have to load it with filters where old Google would kind of get it right away.
[+] [-] marcosdumay|10 years ago|reply
Good thing is that with DDG, I can simply use the !g command, and Google won't know I'm making the query from Brazil, and won't be able to localize it at all.
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zodPod|10 years ago|reply
Another that I've more recently noticed is conversions on mobile. I went from being able to type any approximation of "ounces" "to/in/-" "pounds" and getting a number right away to having to click on one of the results to get the number. It seems like backward from Google's normal MO so I don't really understand why they'd do it but I definitely have consistently had problems with that especially more recently.
[+] [-] soared|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epistasis|10 years ago|reply
Not sure that it's the right decision, even if it helps the common case, but it may be. And I say this as somebody who's not particularly fond of Google as a company or its policies.
[+] [-] gherkin0|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superskierpat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelwww|10 years ago|reply
Does deluge bittorrent support retina display?
The 7th link result for that question has the text "Deluge has updated their program to support the Retina Display" in it's text summary. That's good enough for me.
[+] [-] Obi_Juan_Kenobi|10 years ago|reply
It would still be nice to have an 'advanced' search mode that was more strict, allowed advanced features, and still took advantage of Google's talent and infrastructure.
[+] [-] commentzorro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|10 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+%2Bretina
Or in verbatim mode:
https://www.google.com/search?q=deluge.app+retina&tbs=li:1
His article says that the answer is in the 4th result, the first that actually includes both of his search terms. But if you read that article, it's actually saying that Twitter's app has no retina support, and Deluge is mentioned elsewhere on the page, with nothing about retina support.
[+] [-] nkurz|10 years ago|reply
Edit: Wait, you work for Google, right? Am I the one that's lost? Did they switch back to supporting +term?
[+] [-] osener|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deeths|10 years ago|reply
The autocorrection and removal of terms accomplishes the same thing.
While I think these measures may be partially to help users, I think they're actually mostly cost-saving measures on Google's part.
[+] [-] AlexTes|10 years ago|reply
Now this is where a bit of guess work comes in but I'd say Google correctly deduces there is no such thing. Even the best result for both terms just talks about some app not supporting retina, and from the looks of it does help with what other client you might want to use if switching to OSX when you were previously a deluge user on Linux (possibly when dealing with retina). But that's not deluge. That's a useless result considering your primary intent was finding deluge. So Google chooses to give you results that might get you what you want over results that (correctly) only disappoint explaining there is no such thing. So in the first three results Google correctly decides that, to get you a relevant result at all it needs to omit the "retina" to get you results that might possibly get you what you want - deluge despite not having retina support - over just giving you the results that are relevant but definitely won't get you what you want. Your query had no results that would get you what you wanted so Google tried to alter the query and see if it could get you something useful anyway.
I think Google trying to give you results that might be hits instead of giving you disappointment in the first place is very sensible behavior.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonniemuffin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdSharkey|10 years ago|reply
Maybe google has become like robocop receiving 100+ prime directives. All these low quality, noisy inputs are simply driving the engine bonkers?
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vmp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]