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.
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.