If you argue this is bad behavior: Maybe we need a web query which really only takes the query literally. Putting the query in quotes will not quite have this effect for Google. Maybe some other syntax?
In this very specific case I don't buy it. Sure, it probably applies for other queries, but if you approach a salesperson and ask him for "shirts without stripes" it's pretty clear what you want, and he wont bring you any piece with stripes on it.
The only difference is that those are all physical properties of a shirt while stripes is a type of pattern.
shirt without buttons - preety much fail.
shirt without red button - as already expected, shirts with red buttons
* tie without paisley * tie not paisley * non-paisley ties * ties that aren't paisley * ties other than paisley
You guessed it, in each case, at least half of the results are paisley ties. The only way to actually get what you want -- the set described by X, minus the set described by Y -- is to use the exclusion operator in the search, "ties -paisley".
This is great, and makes intuitive sense to somebody with multiple computer science degrees. But not only is it hard to explain to an outsider, it's actually quite hard to get them to think in a way that accommodates this capability, that is, in terms of set theory.
I have the same reservations about Google as anyone, but rewriting history is never the right move. Moving beyond text matching was what made search truly useful.
> Moving beyond text matching was
> what made search truly useful.
What I don't like is to search for the band "Chrisma" and get results for "fruitcake sale!" because Google corrected my spelling to "Christmas", decided to look for related concepts, and then boost whichever result is the most mercantile.
Yes, they have. Read what I said again, I don't dispute this. What Google does now is an improvement over text matchers. I never claimed that what they do now is better than Google circa 2000 (though I don't care to register an opinion either way on that).
Whatever they've done since, their product remains better than text matchers. Mercantile search is better than terrible search.
See how that works? That's not really what's going on. Sure, G. is incentivized to include pages quickly, but they are also incentivized to produce them accurately, and as the above poster indicates, this is quite a hard problem to solve generally.
A is also incentivized to sell items.
In many cases different algorithms will lead to quantifiably different results. The algorithm changes that work better for the measurement set will be kept and those changes which dont will be discarded. And both A and G do that within different constraints.
Pointing out the obvious: Google is an advertising company. If the cost of producing an accurate result outweighs the advertising income on a given term, there is no incentive for Google to produce better results.
Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads. But unless you consistently give the best results for all queries, people will go whenever does. It's worth investing strongly in all queries, not just highly monetizable ones.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them.
I've typed an insane number of queries since the beginning. A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers and I was pretty sure google delivered all of it. The tiny communities that came with the supper niche topics rarely produced a link I didn't already find. If they did it was new and I didn't google for a while.
Today google feels like it is a pre-ordered list from which it removes the least matching articles. Only if the match is truly shit will it be moved slightly down the page. The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celeberties who only have the first or the last name.
People wont go, it has to get much worse before they do.
edit:
With humans an pets a good slap over the head or a firm NO! will usually do the trick.
There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the first four results are ads.
> A decade ago I use to be able to find truly exotic articles, I could find every obscure blog posting on every blog with 3 readers
My model of what happened is that SEO got a lot better. When Google first came out it was amazing because Page Rank was able to identify implicit ranking information in pages. Once it's valuable to have lots of backlinks, though, this gets heavily gamed. Staying ahead of efforts to game the algorithm is really hard, and I think a lot of times people's experience of a better search engine comes from a time when SEO was much less sophisticated.
> The most convincing in this is typing first name + last name queries in imagines and getting celebrities who only have the first or the last name.
This hasn't been my experience, so I tried an image search for [tom cruise], curious if I would get other Toms. The first 45 responses were all of the celebrity, and image 46 was of Glen Powell in https://helenair.com/people/tom-cruise-helps-glen-powell-lea... which is a different kind of mistake. Do you remember what query you were seeing this on?
I believe what he means is that searching for first name + last name of someone who isn’t a celebrity gets you celebrities who match either the first name or last name.
Searching for Tim Neeson gets you a wall of photos of Liam Neeson: https://www.google.com/search?q=tim+neeson&tbm=isch
Searching for Tim Cruise blankets you with pictures of Tom Cruise, but it at least says “Showing results for tom cruise“ so you know it did an autocorrect. When I tried other first names + Cruise, the effect is less pronounced than with the Neeson example. Maybe it’s because cruise is a more common name as well as an English word.
You don't have to bother creating anything new unless you have something to sell and are willing to invest (big).
Facebook is actually a pretty pathetic implementation where we can still find content created by normal people. If people made traditional websites in stead of facebook groups and facebook pages NO ONE would be able to find it.
We've witnessed the great obliteration of what was once a nice place and now we have to hear google was not to blame?? The death by a thousand cuts is actually well documented.
We tell you what your site must look like or we'll gut it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin Google Penguin is a codename[1] for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines[2]
There, this is what the entire internet must look like. We went from indexing to engineering here.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
rel="ugc"
If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you might remove this attribute from links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time. Read more about avoiding comment spam.
Before this those elaborately contributing got actual credit for it. Do you think you got a choice in it? Google clearly demands you ban credit for comments. OR ELSE!
rel="nofollow"
Woah association! How did we go from linking-to to association? It was important enough for readers but be careful to hide it from google. Such little unimportant websites simply shouldn't exist in our index. We command you to help keep our index clean of such filth!
Then the magical: We wont actually tell you what is wrong with your website! Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 39 "Don't tell customers more than they need to know." Get a budget and hire someone to do SEO. Deal with it, we don't care. No, you don't have any feedback.
Queries without ads do produce revenue. They are an essential part of the formula.
Think of people standing around in bars. We cant argue that just standing there doesn't produce revenue.
The flowers on the table in a restaurant produce revenue.
Free parking produces revenue.
If queries without adds didn't produce revenue they wouldn't exist. More often enough it doesn't even take an extra query, the adds will sit behind the links.
No, it would predict that a query that has no advertising income will poor results. You can determine on your own whether that is the case.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&