Four days ago, while walking around outside I saw an insect. Normally this is nothing to write home about except that I had originally mistaken this insect for an assorted clump of debris. So you can imagine my surprise when not only did it start moving, it did so with gusto, scaling walls and what not. Strangest thing I've ever seen. So I thought I'd check Google to find out what manner of sorcery this was. I expected nothing of course - I had no clue where to start. Search term: "insect with a bunch of junk attached to it".

Google Result: http://i.imgur.com/FGIInog.png?1 vs. Other Search Engine Result: http://i.imgur.com/t8ei8dX.png?1

What I sought was the debris carrying lacewing larvae. Result 2 is far off but I was so happy to put a name to the entity I did not even register that result.

The first thing you will notice is Google trying way too hard and ending up with idiotic suggestions as a result. It seems to use the words and their synonyms without accounting for context. That is the only way it could possibly give PHP, email and bugzilla reports as possible answers to that query [1]. It's a common recent pattern I've been noticing, unless I can model how I think people will write about what I'm searching for and more importantly it is not something the SEO people have motive to polish so vigorously, the content is accidently removed; I won't get good results. That SEO bit is annoying because I remember when my previous searches in the genre (e.g. game related) used to be far more fruitful. The new behavior of adding synonyms is particularly not worth it since the fails are much more spectacular than it wins.

Final stuff: I also compare bing, duck duck go and blekko results whenever I hit queries I think are complicated, none do much better than google. Sometimes they are worse. This result is the first time Samuru blew everyone out of the water, usually it is modestly better [2] (answer in second half vs not so for others [3]). The reason I still use google is force of habit, it took over chrome and most importantly: its incredible and unmatched indexing ability. But I use samuru enough that it's one of my most visited pages.

I have absolutely no affiliation with them, don't know who it's by and found out about it here on HN. According to Paul Graham, Google can be tackled if they can get 10,000 hackers on their side. Time to put the hypothesis to the test, +1 here.

[1] Here is the same search with quotes: http://imgur.com/qiGDnqr&t8ei8dX#0

[3] I only sometimes check page 2 for the others. This might seem unfair but a key UX concept is to minimize latency. Clicking to page 2 seems minor but the EV for that action is so low I skip it. But scrolling just a bit more since I'm already here is much cheaper. UX should absolutely count as much as tech (UX/process + human + algorithms > all).

[2] My annoyance with such vague anecdotes is why I decided to start taking screenshots. And also because results are not stable. For example, search terms that bing once did well on are now embarrassing.

Right now it's either vertical searches or spam most of time.

Yet it seems like the synonym "bug" on Google, plus the other terms like "junk" and "attached", leads to complaints about software.

In a way, you were lucky that the whatsthatbug.com result actually had the word "junk" and "attached". The letter-writer was using the word "junk" in the same meaning you were, but they were using "attached" in the phrase "see attached pics", whereas you were referring to the debris attached to the insect's back.

We're working hard on improving these kinds of challenging queries. I'm going to be remembering the insect with junk attached to its back for a while!

samuru search engine

The "samuru.com" did not come up on first five pages. Then it starts suggesting samurai.

Contrary, searching

duck duck go search engine

has the https://duckduckgo.com/ as the first result.

Now Google's entire first page is results about the Samuru search engine, starting with a press release by Stremor announcing their new search engine and touting its use of "language heuristics".

We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google "ignoring the word you asked for," there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn't have the exact words you asked for, and you didn't even notice. We're not perfect but we're always working on improvements.

We also added "Verbatim Mode" to save you the trouble of putting "each" "query" "term" in "quotes" when you want to exactly match all your query words.

Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.

This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.

Google Search fails whenever I'm doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can't just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn't help, because the problem isn't the rankings, it's that you don't know when you're done.

Then there's personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it's often because the first query had something in it that I didn't want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can't trust that the reason is part of the query I made.

Basically, you've improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics' blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what's wrong, but they are right. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.

Verbatim was a regression, given it requires you to use the UI instead of typing inline, and it seems to interact with other search options in hard to predict ways.

> A + could apply to a single word or to a single phrase

I don't think a + could apply to a phrase. That was one problem with the + operator; it was not clear to users how it actually worked. In fact, though there were many searches whose results were helped by their use of + (many of whom made by users who are commenting here on HN), there were many searches whose results were largely made worse by their use of +, whether it was inadvertent or overzealously applied.

I had a couple of very unproductive days before working out how to force it to stop changing my search terms.

I could see how vb6/"visual basic" would cause some irrelevant results to come up. It's probably good sometimes, but also really bad sometimes. I've recorded it in our list of motivational examples that we use to try to come up with improvements to our algorithm. Thanks, and sorry for your wasted productivity.

ouch.

How do you know that? Just because I click on a result doesn't mean it was the correct one. I usually click on A LOT of results just to check if MAYBE there is something relevant (which is mostly not, especially with Google lately).

At other times, verbatim yields the best results. I guess I just wish there was a link next to the search results that let you repeat the search verbatim, so that we wouldn't have to go all the way to Advanced Search.

I also wish you would remove the multitude of sites that scrape content from the original sites and SEO the hell out of it to get to the top of search results. I assume the advertising revenue is too lucrative to do so.

Remember that the thing that made Google so popular and iconic originally was the plain search box.

1) If I don't notice, then it's not the right result.

2) If I put a + in front of a search term, there's only one reason for that: I explicitly want results containing that word. If you return something not containing that word, then it's not the right result plus I'm going to be annoyed about it.

2) Do you mean putting a search term in "quotes"? The + operator was retired a while ago. And putting the term in quotes should do what you want, except maybe for high confidence spelling corrections or extremely long tail cases where there are just about no search result to show.

For most of them there is no "try again", they simply give up and blame Google (and maybe try the query in Bing/Yahoo).

Are you permitted to share the types of metrics that Google uses to determine whether an algorithm change is producing better results? Is bounce rate the primary metric that is used?

I can't discuss our internal metrics, sorry.

Unlike you though, spam (at least recently) has not been a very strong issue of mine. If I had to name one, I'd say that "personalization" of the results was the worst offender to the quality my search results, and the positive thing is that we can turn that one off.

As crazy as it sounds, I wish another good search engine comes, as Google feels more and more like the "least bad" option, rather than the "good" one to me, and I'm just talking about search results, voluntarily excluding privacy & other topics from the debate.

Funny thing, I did not make this myself, which shows me clearly that I am not the only one feeling this way.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-1/?src...

Thanks.

To some extent, I hope they're able to maintain their position. If Google were unseated, I would miss the big, audacious side-projects that they undertake.

+1 to that. At the least Google should have added a ++ operator to replace the co-opted +.

Google also happily returns results which do not fulfill even the "close" suggestions: e.g. I ask for three words, Google searches for those three words, and returns a bunch of pages that contain only two or one of those words. Google, that's not what I asked for.

Google's attempts to tweak my queries and also return results that don't fulfill all requirements makes it much less useful to me, because they usually backfire. I don't want my queries tweaked -- I want exactly what I asked for, and only what I asked for. If I made a mistake, I can figure it out and fix it myself.

I noticed the same a few months ago. If you want an exact match you have to click on "Search tools" >> "All results" >> "Verbatim".

I would be very curious, if you set up Verbatim search as your default search engine in your browser, how often you have to "fix" it, and if you ever find it easier to see what Google makes of your non-verbatim query. I'd especially be interested in how often the thing you're searching for doesn't really exist on the web, and so Google is replacing "no results" with "off-topic results."

Other than that, I'm pretty sure that a word in "quotes" must appear in the result to be retrieved, without any alternatives. If you have a counter-example, I would love to see it! (I work on that code.)

It'd be nice if there were an option to revert the behavior.

Today I usually know where the information is before I Google it (StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.) which means their value add has diminished. It's less "search" and more "navigational aid."

But I highly doubt much Yahoo's traffic is coming from search. They've got Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, omg! (which is huge), Flickr, Tumblr, etc. Yahoo is in the content business.

Plus, I know of some people (especially older people) who have Yahoo set as their homepage, and they'll freak out if it gets set to anything else. And besides, Yahoo is a much better homepage than iGoogle for most people, particularly if they use Yahoo mail.

About * Mail, after everything Google did to be more social and whatnot, there's still no integration with Gmail, only Google Plus. A mail counter in Google's black bar would have been more useful.

[0] http://help.dukgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215637-autoco...

but I agree with some of the comments, sometimes I know I should search something on Amazon, Wikipedia, iMDB, Tripadvisor etc.. and I just use Google to go there (because typically if you search a movie iMDB is one of the first results, if you search "hotel xyz review" you got Tripadvisor etc..)

SO is more useful when you have a problem that you're trying to debug, and official docs are more useful when you're trying to understand new concepts. Unfortunately Google doesn't allow any way to differentiate between these modes.

You can even setup those parameters as custom search engines in Chrome so you don't have to repeat yourself every time.

Google is absolutely unusable for some search terms that are not part of the primary association of the term. Try searching for "caravan" in a query not related to buying caravans, or caravan holiday parks (I was searching for a particular book that featured a caravan). If I don't mention the word "buy" or "holiday" I would not expect to see either.

http://m.bitraf.no/~mortehu/skrot/caravan_book.png

It even shows the cover of several books featuring a caravan.

What's amazing here is the obviousness of the fact that Google is only going to do what either a) maintains or b) increases its profits...

Giving you good and relevant search results was the bootstrap. Now (that they've dominated the market and passed the bellcurve) it's nothing more than a hindrance to CTR (click through rates) on paid search ads.

That is, the better (more relevant) the results, the less someone is going to look at the ads.

Up to a few years ago, I would have never believed that Google crafted results to increase ad clicks but now I do. Looks like MBAs from fancy colleges have taken over everything. Their ad clicks are increasing by a suspiciously large percentage each quarter.

They are back at page one: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results." http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html