Google started this really annoying habit of including results that don’t have the words you are searching. You can get around this by including the word in quotes but it’s frustrating to spend a few minutes looking items returned by Google to not find what you’re looking for to realize they showed it to you even though it didn’t have your search terms.
I bet this is great for current events like “when is Star Wars 1 playing” when the person probably meant Star Wars 8. But sucks when researching items or searching for a paper or particular product.
I started using Duck Duck Go and it works great. The privacy is an added bonus.
My biggest search wish is an option to eliminate any results from online shopping sites. Hell, I want a "give me the old web" toggle that eliminates shopping sites, social media, and any corporate websites so I can just find the hand-written HTML from the weirdos who'll tell me how to change the clutch on a 1969 MG Midget.
All search interfaces should support "Don't show me this again". All of them.
Imagine having a roommate who doesn't remember you want to avoid sugar and are allergic to nuts, yet keeps making PBJ sandwiches when it's his turn to make dinner. That and you're getting effin PBJ for dinner.
Web search: Don't show me anything from this domain again.
Google: You are so keen to remember things about me that I don't want you to remember. But you don't bother to remember what I reject? Of course, because I am the product, not the customer. This feature might run afoul of your relationship with advertisers, yeah?
Yelp search: You've suggested this place before, I spent the time to read the details and reviews and rejected it, but you keep showing it to me on future searches, and because as a human I can't remember all the stuff you've showed me before, I waste time considering it all over again. You even show me places I rated 1 star. STOP!
Maybe DuckDuckGo could add this feature? Please? Pretty Please?
I find, when searching for info on a relatively uncommon bug DDG will give me a page that starts with a relevant stackoverflow answer then continues on to list a bunch of sites that scrape SO and repost the content. It's extremely annoying.
This is my frustration as well. Today's web (as seen through search engines) is just content marketing.
And to reach such a page, you have to go through ads on the results page, then a newsletter popup (sometimes two, these days), then ads all around the content (which is still marketing, remember).
I'd like to see a search engine where a trusted/verified set of users are allowed to categorize websites and the categories thus derived can be used by everyone to help filter their searches.
So when a categorizing user does a search and clicks on a result that takes them to best-auto-parts.co.uk, they click "Shopping" on their categorization toolbar. After one or two matching categorizations, that site gets excluded from searches which have "shopping sites" turned off.
You could also turn the categorizing thing around and decide that you only want to search within web forums (phpBB systems and similar), where you'll often find people posting rather esoteric knowledge about whatever esoteric car you're searching for.
You are describing Yahoo, ca. 1995. The problem is that new users have no idea how to navigate the categorization system. (Remember using the dewey decimal system? It had the same problem, except that your local librarian was there to help.)
Yeah, I remember the old categorization thing. I'm thinking of a much more high-level categorization: Here's sites selling shit. Here's web forums. Social media. Blogs. Commercial sites.
Honestly what I'd really like is a toggle that I can flip over to say "only show me sites that aren't trying to sell me shit", and then maybe I can read an honest review about the tent I'm interested in without 50 bullshit blog entries that just copy-pasted the manufacturer's copy and added an Amazon affiliate link.
DMOZ[0] was that catalog, more or less, and was used as you describe, more or less. It finally died last year, although I think it was quite dormant for the last 10 or so.
Basically you want Yahoo but with a Wikipedia-like hierarchical tagging. You need a reputation system though so the editing isn’t just seo’d getting us to the same situation we’re currently in.
If Facebook had an api, you could filter based on the tags just provided by your contacts or something like that.
I'd use a search engine that removes any result that includes an affiliate link. Some shopping sectors are so crowded with affiliate links that it's impossible to figure out what is real or not
I use DDG all the time now for personal use, but I still use Google at work.
Try this one weird trick to get only what you searched for on Google:
Click on the "Tools" link (under the search box) and change "All results" to "Verbatim" and I think (I dont know for sure) that this will only search for exactly what you typed.
I experience the "overgeneralized results" issue multiple times every week for maybe the past year. It frustrates me every time. If I have to click Tools > All Results > Verbatim every time, frankly I am ready to switch search engines. I am afraid to say that Google has really let itself go.
Is search still the core of their business? Or does most of their income come from things like advertising, AppEngine, google apps for business and android-related stuff? I too feel that google search has been decaying, and saw many people here complainin about the same thing. Maybe they don't want to bother that much with it anymore if their focus has moved to stuff that they actually sell.
Research shows that you can show people intentionally screwed up results, brand them as “google results”, and they’ll prefer them to real google results with swapped branding.
The amount you have to screw up the results to get people to prefer the real results is greater than the difference in performance of the major engines.
Conclusion? Search quality is a cost center at google at this point in the game — they have no economic incentive to improve it further.
Is it though? They have sooo many sources of input, embedded ads everywhere, social buttons, gmail, calendar, documents, photos, android, blogger, youtube, google+, and probably others that IDK, that search is just one---and probably a less important one---of those. As a means to show ads, again, they have uncountable spots all around the internet that they can place ads, and many google apps that one might be using, that the search results page is again just a slice of a big pie.
Or maybe they figured that most people do very simple searches nearly all the time.
I know they earn a lot more from ads on google properties than on third party sites, you can see it in their financial docs. It's something like 80% of their revenue.
So we know embedded ads all around the internet aren't challenging it in any way.
That said I don't know what percentage of their "google property" ad revenue is youtube, gmail, etc. Maybe they're cash cows?
I'm inclined to think it's still mostly search though simply because it's the most valuable source of lead. One where the consumer has buying intent.
Searching for a new car Vs trying to watch a show and having a car shown to you before it.
I can't remember the last time I used a general purpose search engine with an intent to buy. The closest would be an intent to comparison shop, but then I'm explicitly searching for feature comparisons, not stores to buy from.
Yes. But then you can't filter by time range. In their infinite wisdom, Google has made it either-or. Either I can filter by time, or by verbatim. It drives me nuts!
If you think you were frustrated before, just wait: you get to issue about three searches before you have to solve captchas to see the results. Google thinks only bots want to use those features simultaneously.
Seriously? This would be a deal breaker for me. It would also be nice to be able to save preferences so that I only ever get results from the past year unless I specify otherwise. It just takes additional clicks and is a big pain from the search engine that's supposed to be user friendly.
Google is a sitting duck for innovation, why does it not suggest scopes for search (paris = person / place), or show me a graph of results over time, or let me exclude pages with X% similarity and show me the most likely original source, there is so much room for improvement, exciting times...
Seconded... I use DDG or Google + Verbatim mode. I set DDG is my browser default, and use `!g` to hit google if I don't like the results. (or !gis for google image search)
Thanks. This is really helpful. Comically I googled and DDG’d for how to do this to no avail. And last time I checked under tools I didn’t notice verbatim as an option. But tools is different now. The shifting UI should make me recheck.
Even though I can’t set this for a default, I can at least choose it when necessary and it’s faster than quote escaping terms.
I recently tried DDG again after reading the quality was approaching Google. I was surprised to find the results are actually much better, for exactly this reason. The results I get from Google are often filled with answers to distinctly different, but much more popular searches; sometimes even after adding quotes around terms.
Another nice feature of DDG is that the '-' operator works very well.
I hate this so fucking much. Seems like every other search 70% of the top results have one of my necessary keywords removed. And I don't want to switch to verbatim because I do appreciate the fact that they search synonyms and don't necessarily want to remove that.
This is why I can’t switch back from ddg to google. (Not that I really want to —- the only google feature I miss is the calculator, and I can get that with g! searches.)
Ddg has been slowly cranking up synonym search, but it’s much better executed (triggers less often) than google’s implementation.
Ironically, the appeal of Google over competitors when they were just starting out was precisely that you could find what you were searching for without having to add a bunch of symbols to tweak your query.
This makes me think. Why not add a Google Science or Google Dev with those features removed. Basically Google Scholar but also showing stackoverflow, blogs and GitHub code/gists?
Also Google without country redirection, my pet peeve. I can't use Google in private browsing mode any more since it insists redirecting to German results (yes, I'm currently physically in Germany), so I've started using DDG too.
I used this as default before I switched to DuckDuckGo completely. For a software developer google.de results are pretty useless. Switching the language to English helps a bit, but ncr results are a lot better for software and tech topics.
Also, if you want to break out of your own bubble and get non-personalized results, Google is pretty useless, because of the annoying data protection pop up.
Pretty much the only times I use Goggle is for local search , otherwise I’m pretty happy with ddg.
I believe ncr doesn't really work for this purpose anymore as searching on google.com will give you results for the country you're in without redirecting you to a different TLD.
Preferences works in regular mode, but I've noticed I mostly browse in private mode these days. Opening a private browser window has just become a habit I suppose, and probably not a bad habit either.
I do use NCR to switch to regular results in normal browsing mode where the selection sticks, but I don't know how to do that for the Firefox search box in private browsing.
In my experience Google is usually giving more relevant results to software development related searches, so I would like to retain that at least as an option.
A long time ago they changed it so that using '+' would cause it to search within "google plus" entries. They did this completely silently and the sad thing is it took people quite a long time to figure out that the meaning had been changed.
Yes, DDG does it too. The other significant difference I've noticed, in my admittedly short-but-intense periods of DDG use, is that unlike Google, it won't block you with a CAPTCHA for "searching too hard"; but sometimes it just runs out of results.
Looking through too many search pages, or using queries containing quotes and other "advanced" things like site: or intext: or intitle: operators tends to get you blocked by Google pretty quickly, which is extremely infuriating --- and the point at which I switch to DDG or something else for a while.
They started doing that recently :-/ I guess the appeal to ape leader is strong, even if leader lost its ways. But I am running out of options for search so have to live with it...
I think there's actually a better example of the usefulness of Google's broad search embedded in there: Somebody writing "Star Wars 1" most likely intends Episode 4 rather than Episode 1.
I agree, this is extremely annoying, Google should add an option - for their users who know what they are doing - to always do a verbatim search.
I also still detest their mobile first format on iPad, again why on earth don’t they let their users choose Desktop format, if they prefer this. I have to use slower than Safari iCab Browser to get around this.
The minus option did once filter out results with that word, and could be amazingly helpful to find less used meanings of primary search terms. But it did go away about the same time as the + operator.
Depends on your browser, but for example, in Chrome, you can set your default search in chrome://settings/searchEngines for the omnibox search. Mine is:
"Google started this really annoying habit of including results that don't have the words you are searching."
Queried a one word string that is probably in hundreds of pages.
Got 5 bogus results.
On the plus side, I noticed ddg has apparently fixed an issue they used to have with prefixing result urls with a ddg proxy url, as other search engines are known to do.
To disable this, previously the user had to turn on Javascript. I never use Javascript, and I got the urls unprefixed, as they should be.
search: test2 (no quotes)
23 results
15 had test2 inurl
3 had test2 intitle
0 had test2 inpage
5 were not found inurl, intitle or elsewhere
see below
1. http://www.test.com/
2. https://dndprojects.anheuser-busch.com/mobile
3. https://www.icardnet.uillinois.edu/public/
4. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_content_en/dmv/pubs/interactive/tdrive/clc3written?lang=en
5. https://test.salesforce.com/
cname is "test.l2.salesforce.com"
Some thoughts from a search engine author:
"For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results (demo available at google.stanford.edu). For the type of full text searches in the main Google system, PageRank also helps a great deal.
"Our compact encoding uses two bytes for every hit. There are two types of hits: fancy hits and plain hits. Fancy hits include hits occurring in a URL, title, anchor text, or meta tag. Plain hits include everything else."
"We chose a compromise between these options, keeping two sets of inverted barrels -- one set for hit lists which include title or anchor hits and another set for all hit lists. This way, we check the first set of barrels first and if there are not enough matches within those barrels we check the larger ones."
"Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight."
Years ago, but years after they launched, I heard they hired a large number (100s? 1000s?) of editors to manually tweak page ranks. Basically, page rank is easy to game and doesn’t really work anymore.
I bet this is great for current events like “when is Star Wars 1 playing” when the person probably meant Star Wars 8. But sucks when researching items or searching for a paper or particular product.
I started using Duck Duck Go and it works great. The privacy is an added bonus.