Overall I still love Google, I must use the search service 50 times a day so complaints about shortcomings are a bit like grumbling about the paintwork on my free new car :-) So I'll try and identify two recurring (and relatively new-feeling) headaches:
1. quotes. When I put it "in quotes" I don't want ti speell-checked, or cleaned, or made case-insensitive, or whatever else. I would rather get not results and experiment with other strings, than think I've got results that turn out not to be exactly what I searched for. It seems to me like punctuation often gets stripped even if it's inside quotes. For some kinds of searches involving bits of source code or so, this can be a drag.
2. Content farming. I know you are constantly struggling against people gaming the system and so forth. I don't blame Google when I get 50 results of generic junk referring to obscure search terms...the "find [niche product] resellers, hints, tips!" types that are totally generic. but what does piss me off is that a few months ago Google offered a button that would let zap such results, and I could label clutter as clutter. Now on a deep search, I often spend several minutes trying to think what terms are common enough to content farms that -excluding them will prune the results sufficiently that the remaining search results are worth checking one by one.
You remember that Bing ad where someone says something random and their geeky partner starts hypnotically chanting associated but unhelpful phrases, implying an overbroad result set? Sorry, but they had a point.
On content farms, we've definitely heard that feedback. One point up for debate is whether to respond with algorithms-only, or whether we should update our quality guidelines to call out low-quality content farms as a type of webspam. Both DuckDuckGo and Blekko seem delighted to remove sites that most people don't like from the search results. Here's a link for DDG for example: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25532/ . The question is: would you feel comfortable if Google removed results that a lot of people don't like from our index? And how do you balance the goal of reducing clutter and junk with the goal of being fair and comprehensive?
and if people wanted a fuller result, you can say, "more lower quality links found. Click here to view all" similar to the way that searching in gmail lets you search in trash & spam.
Farming-wise, I think you should probably keep all those results in your index, even the ones that are composed of nothing more than your top searches separated by random phrases! even if it's not there now, in future it'll be possible to score page content on whether or not it has semantic value and draw inferences about sites or entire domains that are filled with junk. That will be interesting and useful from security, economic, and scientific points of view. In the meantime people will find useful analyses to run against that 'bad' data in your results which would not be practical if you purged too aggressively.
What I had envisioned (which might be a tad ambitious, but bear in mind that you already have 5% of my local CPU for the asking with the desktop tool installed) is per-user search filtering. I may like sculpture but hate politics, so I would always search for 'statue -liberty', you are the other way around so your searches tend more towards 'liberty -statue'; I would very much like to be able to have complex filters on the client side, either locally or on the client-facing parts of your servers - and not just for spam sites.
DDG takes the approach of allowing regex, which is a neat thing for the people who know enough to want it, and it would be interesting if search patterns and/or selective exclusions (as described above) could be stored locally, as either weighting tables or some sort of white/blacklist - always include wikipedia, never include about.com. I'm already running chrome and using a Nexus one, so perhaps some hashing could take place on my computers rather than increasing the load on your servers.
The other reason besides spam is that lately I find myself wanting to do specialized searches, but I don't know how to specify the bounds of the search space. For example, I'm interested in law. But a lot of legal terms are in popular currency, so even if I search for "theft +legal" I may get tons of results for cheap car alarms or something. It would be fantastic if I could get a large set of results by specifying a large number of domain-specific terms - say, "tortfeasor privity precedent appellate" - and then hash and save that result set as a 'search space'. So then I could do more specific searches and know that my results would mostly come from websites devoted to the subject, with few that mention it only incidentally.
In actual fact, the legal resources searchable via Scholar and Books are fantastic. I just picked law as an example of where you might want to temporarily limit your search set because most people can appreciate the difference between writing specifically about legal topics vs things that just mention the subject in passing. If you want to learn how to write a good disclaimer, "legal disclaimer" is not a good start because every 3rd landing page on the net includes that phrase as boilerplate. If users could save and reuse result sets, we'd get more actionable results, you'd (maybe) get lower server loads but more importantly, every successful hit (where the user doesn't search again or try another result for several minutes) is an implicit vote for the relevance of the result to the set, and thus a valid input to a semantic classifier.
/facepalm
So, this whole thing started out as a brief rant that's been in my head for a couple of months. Also, I wanted to get rid of those tabs that had been on the far left side of Firefox for ages. I'm not even sure why I posted it to HN; I just did it and then intended to head out the door afterward, except that all of a sudden my web server became unresponsive.
Anyway: the ability to get results from the past year is great, and I was totally unaware of it. I'll update my post shortly with a note about that. Having something like that sticking right out on the left-hand side would be even better. :-)
I think I often see people complaining about search quality (here, and in the other HN thread I linked to from about a year back, as examples), but if you ask them about the specifics of the search, they don't remember. I think that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow. Although it's at least partly laziness on the user's part, I think Google could view this as a huge amount of potentially beneficial information that they're missing out on. Trying to improve search results without knowing what problems people are having with them is challenging, at least.
It would be nifty if there were some kind of "these were not the search results I was looking for" quick form linked from certain types of search results.
We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?"
I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.
Okay, here goes. Lately I have been doing a lot of C# searches. Google suggest strips out the hash (#) from the suggest items, so I keep getting faked out by likely C programming matches. Can you please stop stripping off the "#"? Otherwise, I'll need to attach a hot wire to my down arrow to break the habit. Thanks.
Normally Google doesn't allows searches for punctuation, because doing so would swell the index size a lot for very little return in terms of helpful searches. But since we're engineers, we do search some punctuation, e.g. underscores so you can search for sprintf_s, and terms like C# and F#. I'll ask whether the # can carry through into Suggest.
I think I've tried more than a couple of times to give some feedback about the search results. Seeing that nothing happened, and getting nothing but an automated response, I've stopped doing that.
Reporting flashing ads to the ad team worked better, they were removed later the same day.
Overall I agree with you, but even if we had that channel, many times the feedback would be: "Yup, that's a bad set of search results. We'll try to come up with a way to make it better, but it might be a while. Getting an algorithm to do better on this search will be hard."
$ wget http://bmtcinfo.com/ --2010-09-14 09:01:43-- http://bmtcinfo.com/ Resolving bmtcinfo.com... failed: Name or service not known. wget: unable to resolve host address `bmtcinfo.com'
The url http://bmtcinfo.com/ just doesn't work in a browser or with wget. And trying to fetch the "www" version of the website, it does a 302 redirect to a deeper url. 302 redirects are the ones that don't pass PageRank. The last time we tried to crawl the page, we got an error--probably from the non-www version. I'll see what we can do to find this site better, but returning errors instead of content to Googlebot really hurts that effort.
By the way, we provide a free webmaster console that would let the owner of this domain self-diagnose these issues. The "Fetch as Googlebot" feature lets the owner send Googlebot to fetch a url on their site and see what Googlebot saw, including errors and redirects. If the owner of bmtcinfo.com were to use that tool, they'd probably notice the errors pretty quickly.
I am amazed at how many users still don't know about this feature. It is one of the best features in google search (that was added recently). Google should promote it better to its users.
While Google Instant is technically impressive, the feeling of speed is undone whenever I have to next manually restrict the results to the past year or 6 months or whatever (and sometimes experiment with multiple durations) in order to filter out discussions from 2008 and earlier. Same with using regular search as well.
Hence, might I suggest you guys consider something like inverting the default search, to only include pages created or modified within the past year (or whatever duration you calculate most optimal for returning relevant results)? Or perhaps changing the PageRank weighting of recency, at least for domains that change rapidly. I know this could cause some problems, and I'm not sure the web is quite at the age where this is necessary yet, but I think there's an inflection point coming soon where more searchers will expect recent results in their top 10 rather than years-old pages.
It might also be worth moving the duration filter up one tier of UI so it is both clearly visible on the search results page, only takes one instead of two clicks to activate. The OP isn't the only one who's recently needed searches restricted by age and didn't realize just from the UI that this could be done. A few months ago I made a similar complaint on another forum and was informed of the same thing - use Search Tools -> Past X. But it's not obvious to do that on the current UI.
- [avaya 103r manual] It's a fair complaint to say some low-quality results are returned, but there's a reason. Do that search and Google says "About 1,510 results." That's a minuscule number of results--it usually means the web has very little content that matches that query in any way. That's why the lower-quality and foreign results show up: we're scraping the bottom of the barrel of the web to find any results at all, and there's not many pages that have that those words. If you go to avaya.com and search for [103r], they don't find any results either. It's hard for Google to return useful Avaya results when avaya.com doesn't have that word anywhere on the site. :)
- You were looking for specs on a Gateway mt6840 motherboard, specifically the socket. Instead of trying to solve that in one query, I'd go for doing it in two steps. I did the query [site:gateway.com mt6840] to see if there was any authoritative result, and the #1 result was http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/2007/Oasis/1014554R/1014... which has specs for that motherboard, but not the socket. But that spec sheet mentions that the motherboard uses a Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T2450. So then I searched for [T2450 socket] and got a Wikipedia page that says the T2450 uses Socket M. Just to be safe, searching for [MT6840 "socket m"], which returns a page on computing.net that's a forum with some ads, but the page mentions "945GM-based laptops support Socket M Core 2 Duo CPUs." The Gateway spec sheet says the MT6840 uses a 945GM chipset, so Socket M seems like a safe bet.
- The last search was about an OpenSolaris machine that wouldn't boot and that said "Error 16" instead. The complaint was that the results were stale/old. I did the search [opensolaris boot "error 16"]. Then over on the left-hand side, click "Show search tools" and click "Past year" to get results from the past year. The #1 result shows a long discussion about debugging this (which implies it's not a trivial issue). The #2 result is a discussion that points into opensolaris.org, which then points to this bug: http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6774616 . My point on this query is that you can use the left-hand search bar to restrict the results to a certain time range (e.g. only results from the last week, month, or year).
We do try to provide tools (e.g. estimated number of results, or the ability to restrict results by date) to help find the answers--or to find out if there aren't good answers on the web.
And in some cases like your #2 search, we could do a better job of synthesizing information. If page A says that a motherboard uses this chip/chipset and page B says that this chip/chipset uses this socket, then we could infer what socket the motherboard uses. Inferring information like this is really tricky though because the web can be really noisy.
I'm not saying Google shouldn't do better on these searches. You're clearly a power searcher, and I share your frustration when it's really hard to find what you want using Google. I'll pass this article around within the search quality group at Google and see if we could do better on searches like these--thanks for the feedback.