I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results I'm looking for.
It's always worked reasonably well and saves me from trying to come up with a search.
At the same time I've noticed that coming up with a sequence of search terms has been working worse and worse in google over the last couple years. I frequently get results for whatever google thinks I was searching for, especially if my original search terms resulted in very few results or no results, I'll just get a result page anyway except it's almost never helpful.
Perhaps this is an attempt to make Google more Star-Trek/Watson-like, and it's great for those use-cases. But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.
> I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results I'm looking for.
This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.
Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.
Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.
Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.
So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.
Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.
Google is increasingly becoming an "Ask Jeeves" clone. I have very little control of my searches and Google just returns what it thinks I meant, rather than what I actually typed.
I would love an advanced search mode with some simple boolean logic, even if it took several seconds to return the result, for those times when you really need to sift through a lot of garbage to find the results you really want.
What is the point of Google returning results in 0.000000001 seconds if they aren't the results I wanted and I have very little means of refining the search. The moment a new search engine comes with this functionality and a decent indexed base, it's bye-bye Google for me.
This is why I basically use DuckDuckGo for any search where I know exactly what terms I want to be super weighted, and Google for things like: "What is the weather in Amsterdam?"
It's worked out really well. That plus the !g operator in ddg means I get the best of both worlds, I'd suggest you try it for a day or so and see how it goes.
Same here. I was struggling over some results a couple times today where I entered keywords and it seemed more like Google was trying to answer a question. Wish I could turn the new thing off. I don't use Google that way.
But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.
It is a boatload of extra typing, but the "allintext:" operator is your friend for those kinds of searches. I wish there was a URL modifier that could force google to assume allintext: on the search - that way I could have two different google search engines in firefox, one for literal and one for more "semiotic" searches. Maybe there is and I just don't know it?
You only need to look at google's knowledge graph alongside google now to see that that's where they're going. Many Question Answering Systems are able to handle many kinds of questions with relative accuracy now. With all of the different kinds of data sources out there, I'm not really surprised.
That being said machine learning is far from perfect. Allowing for user correction is still an immense must.
Let's hope basic search operators like quotes don't go away anytime soon.
I have noticed the same and I am having more and more difficulty to find exactly what I want in the first result page. The disappearance of the minus and plus operators is probably the major reason for me not getting the results that I want.
I wish the 1998 Google page that made the front page on HN was real (with updated index of course).
I operate 2 websites that are exact clones of each others, the only difference is the domain. This algorithm change literally shifted %70 of the traffic from one of them to the other one, in a matter of hours.
Edit:
* Links to the websites, I would say almost identical
* Same number of the pages are indexed by google, around ~5 million
* Domains are almost same, no keyword difference
* They both have same pagerank
* Domains are registered together
* Sites are hosted on different ips
* Total traffic sites get is around ~40k/day unique
* By this change, total unique increased by %10
TFA mentions this update happened weeks ago. How are you able to pin this down to the hour and correlate your traffic changes to the algo change if we don't know when the algo change happened exactly?
Google has an interesting localization issue when it comes to Canada. If you ask it for someone's height, it gives it in metric, but everyone here uses imperial for body related measurements. The same goes for area, I hear acre a lot more than hectare, but "How big is disneyland" gives me 65ha.
If people use your product all day, everyday, and you release the biggest overhaul of your product in 4 years, and nobody notices, is that a good thing, or a bad thing?
It makes me wonder if Google has become so "good enough" that more and more engineering effort will be spent for smaller and smaller returns.
i think it's unequivocally a good thing. Google has a product that works, they aren't trying to change the functionality. People's habits online and the type and volume of data that google indexes has changed, and google needs to update their algorithms so that the product functions the same despite the new inputs the algorithm is receiving.
Assuming "no one notices" as a good proxy for search quality remaining the same, I would argue that Google's getting better since the playing field is getting harder...
* There are a ton more people actively researching ways to reverse-engineer and game the system.
* There are a ton more sites and more content getting generated, including bot-generated ones which are of dubious quality.
Looking at it from the inside working on search, I see the returns as actually getting bigger and bigger. As Google gets better, people get more confident in issuing more complicated queries, which ups the bar again for the types of things search has to be able to do.
If people use your product all day, everyday, and you release the biggest overhaul of your product in 4 years, and nobody notices, is that a good thing, or a bad thing?
How do you know it was the "biggest overhaul"? Google is known to use every moment to hype itself.
Also Google has been doing these changes since 2011 almost monthly. Now sites that sell things or make money have almost given up on "free" traffic from Google, they know it's pay to play (outside Product Search it's not openly pay-to-play but you get the message after a few 70% traffic reducing updates).
This is going to be not good news for SEO people that just have affiliate ads and used to do things like Celebrity Net Worth bc now the user does not have to click on their site as Google will give them the answer they need.
The shift to answering questions becomes really important over the longer term, and people shift to using voice as a means of interacting with the net.
Dictated queries are going to come as natural language, not query syntax.
I remember building websites for the Internet back in the day. Now, all we do is building websites for Google as it became the main entrance of the Internet.
So it means a lot more words will be parsed as highlighters (like 'how to' or 'where is') of one or more main search terms. I see the big usability leap it will be for very everyday life, natural searches. At the same time the list of almost non searchable terms will be growing so much.
I dread the day I'll have to look for some satiric blog called something like 'how to not' but I won't be sure enough about the exact terms to allow me to search verbatim.
It feels like there's an expanding dark space in the shadow of bright neons.
I'm speculating that this change is the result of analyzing their users' behavior. Over the past couple of years I made a switch to asking questions, especially when trying to figure out some obscure Excel code I needed or something like that. I almost always found some forum response that would answer my question relatively quickly. I'm curious to see how this change will effect the results compared to my past experience. This might prove to be a boon for sites like Quora, as well.
Funny story (at least for me): When I was 13, I wrote a letter to Google to implement this because my mom used to search like this, entire sentences. I also remember I attached an algorithm of how they should do it - rewriting the sentences into separate and useful keywords.
I've been watching this ever since I noticed the a/b testing. One of the side effects is that you bounce off the Google page rather than click through to some page. Google got into some trouble for this with currency exchanges (the calculator would auto calculate currency conversions) But they seem to have worked around that complaint (type in x dollars in y currency to see a 'one box' type answer).
I wish I could see how it affects their AdSense revenue. (a lot of 'answer' sites are just AdSense landing pages)
At what point does it take all the load off the Wikipedia servers if it just serves up the answer on the page :-)
There are many things that I think should be google-time-worthy:
- mail notifier as a first class citizen, a tiny dot would be a time saver
- many of their urls are 256+ chars in size ... , I'd love parseable urls that fit in a 1024 width browser bar
- no more link hijack on the front page, they surely know how to do it without rewriting the link on click ... or at least propose a quick way to select the original url shown below (a web semantic-unit/best-practice since long)
I just had to ask, "How has Google changed its search algorithm?" and that produced some interesting results, with not all of the results being about the latest change.
As we search more on mobile devices, the way we interact with a search engine changed. Just look at Siri. It may not be a ground breaking technology now but we're slowing moving to making more and more voice controlled search requests. Some of these requests are better answered by Wolfram Alpha than Google.
During the past decade, Wikipedia emerged as the primary source of high quality organized digital knowledge. This, together with the open data policy practiced at may governmental agencies, supplied search engines with quantitative data easy to process and understand.
For the next few years, this looks like the biggest change in search engine technology to expect. We are going to switch from mathematically precise queries and semantic processing of the search corpus to a semantic processing of the queries and a reliance on more quantitative data sources.
People have used increasingly longer, more specific search queries over the years, either through Google's efforts or through people learning to make use of search engines. This is the logical next step since people were always asking questions of Google, even if people didn't always realize it.
Well, the article says it's in place for a longer period of time - we see a major organic traffic growth from Google on https://usersnap.com and many search result entries popped from page 2 to page 1 (and thus leading to clicks).
That's interesting...For the longest time, the .org domain that has my name, but that I haven't updated in at least 3 years (and has no real content), was almost always on the first result of Google searches for my name. Now it's nowhere to be seen
The change is interesting. It's making me re-think the description/title of my site if this algorithm is based on serving up the answer to questions. I have noticed that my traffic has dropped a little so I might not be targeting correctly.
I think, This is not end of the SEO but it's very difficult to get traffic for new website by seo. As new search engine's algorithm back link value is zero. But Content should be unique and informational.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
It's always worked reasonably well and saves me from trying to come up with a search.
At the same time I've noticed that coming up with a sequence of search terms has been working worse and worse in google over the last couple years. I frequently get results for whatever google thinks I was searching for, especially if my original search terms resulted in very few results or no results, I'll just get a result page anyway except it's almost never helpful.
Perhaps this is an attempt to make Google more Star-Trek/Watson-like, and it's great for those use-cases. But for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.
[+] [-] furyofantares|12 years ago|reply
This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.
Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.
Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.
Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.
So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.
Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.
[+] [-] cromwellian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|12 years ago|reply
I would love an advanced search mode with some simple boolean logic, even if it took several seconds to return the result, for those times when you really need to sift through a lot of garbage to find the results you really want.
What is the point of Google returning results in 0.000000001 seconds if they aren't the results I wanted and I have very little means of refining the search. The moment a new search engine comes with this functionality and a decent indexed base, it's bye-bye Google for me.
[+] [-] codemac|12 years ago|reply
It's worked out really well. That plus the !g operator in ddg means I get the best of both worlds, I'd suggest you try it for a day or so and see how it goes.
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amadou|12 years ago|reply
It is a boatload of extra typing, but the "allintext:" operator is your friend for those kinds of searches. I wish there was a URL modifier that could force google to assume allintext: on the search - that way I could have two different google search engines in firefox, one for literal and one for more "semiotic" searches. Maybe there is and I just don't know it?
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html...
[+] [-] agibsonccc|12 years ago|reply
That being said machine learning is far from perfect. Allowing for user correction is still an immense must.
Let's hope basic search operators like quotes don't go away anytime soon.
[+] [-] bumbledraven|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zoomla|12 years ago|reply
I wish the 1998 Google page that made the front page on HN was real (with updated index of course).
[+] [-] obilgic|12 years ago|reply
Edit:
[+] [-] rossjudson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsanu1|12 years ago|reply
TFA mentions this update happened weeks ago. How are you able to pin this down to the hour and correlate your traffic changes to the algo change if we don't know when the algo change happened exactly?
[+] [-] Kudos|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DGCA|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wehadfun|12 years ago|reply
Where is disneyland - Shows a map and has "Get Directions" https://www.google.com/#q=where+is+disneyland
How big is disneyland - 160 acres https://www.google.com/#q=how+big+is+disneyland
[+] [-] alayne|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] riffraff|12 years ago|reply
Not sure if it's new.
[+] [-] rmckayfleming|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus|12 years ago|reply
"What is PI?" shows me a calculator with the result.
[+] [-] nostromo|12 years ago|reply
It makes me wonder if Google has become so "good enough" that more and more engineering effort will be spent for smaller and smaller returns.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsycho|12 years ago|reply
* There are a ton more people actively researching ways to reverse-engineer and game the system.
* There are a ton more sites and more content getting generated, including bot-generated ones which are of dubious quality.
[+] [-] moultano|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjwright|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsullivan01|12 years ago|reply
How do you know it was the "biggest overhaul"? Google is known to use every moment to hype itself.
Also Google has been doing these changes since 2011 almost monthly. Now sites that sell things or make money have almost given up on "free" traffic from Google, they know it's pay to play (outside Product Search it's not openly pay-to-play but you get the message after a few 70% traffic reducing updates).
[+] [-] TheBiv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rossjudson|12 years ago|reply
Dictated queries are going to come as natural language, not query syntax.
[+] [-] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrktb|12 years ago|reply
I dread the day I'll have to look for some satiric blog called something like 'how to not' but I won't be sure enough about the exact terms to allow me to search verbatim.
It feels like there's an expanding dark space in the shadow of bright neons.
[+] [-] lylemckeany|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmtarantino|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cfaftw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
I wish I could see how it affects their AdSense revenue. (a lot of 'answer' sites are just AdSense landing pages)
At what point does it take all the load off the Wikipedia servers if it just serves up the answer on the page :-)
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
There are many things that I think should be google-time-worthy:
- mail notifier as a first class citizen, a tiny dot would be a time saver
- many of their urls are 256+ chars in size ... , I'd love parseable urls that fit in a 1024 width browser bar
- no more link hijack on the front page, they surely know how to do it without rewriting the link on click ... or at least propose a quick way to select the original url shown below (a web semantic-unit/best-practice since long)
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+has+Google+changed+its+s...
[+] [-] ucha|12 years ago|reply
During the past decade, Wikipedia emerged as the primary source of high quality organized digital knowledge. This, together with the open data policy practiced at may governmental agencies, supplied search engines with quantitative data easy to process and understand.
For the next few years, this looks like the biggest change in search engine technology to expect. We are going to switch from mathematically precise queries and semantic processing of the search corpus to a semantic processing of the queries and a reliance on more quantitative data sources.
[+] [-] mkr-hn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grexi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justin123|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|12 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure