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Comment by fhars | Hacker News Reader

What really irks me in the last few month is that google increasingly doesn't actually answer my questions. More often than not, none of the results on the first page contain all of my search terms, and most of the time it is the most specific term that it is missing everywhere. Or the big G has replaced that term with something completely unrelated. I have to prefix every search term with a + if I want to get a result quality that is even remotely similar to what use to be the default.

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Example searches? That's the most constructive way to help us improve.

Isn't it telling that you, if youre speaking on behalf of google i.e. working there on search, dont even know where your weaknesses are dont know where to even begin? If you have to rely on community input to even spot a direction for improvement you probably are in deeper trouble than all these articles suggest. Would Google even be where it is today if they hadn't spotted a weakness and improved it a decade (or more) ago?

I've personally mostly given up google for basically _any_ kind of product search, because it reminded me of going through my spam-riddled email inbox before my provider hat spam filters (or before I switched to gmail). Before that, I've had to give up the Google Groups Usenet interface because it was so cluttered with spam, that it wasnt even funny any more how useless it was, and Google _still_ kept associating its name with it.

If you have to, kick the spammers out manually, to prevent users jumping ship, until you eventually sort it out algorithmically.

Edit: When you downvote a posting I put time in to write, you could at least tell me what downvoteworthy I actually did, so I can refrain from doing it in future, since it is in our common interest to avoid downvoting and being downvoted. So, can you please elaborate in hindsight?

I know plenty of weaknesses in Google, and we work hard on the problems that we think matter the most (e.g. in 2010, we worked a lot on hacked sites so that regular people wouldn't stumble into an awful experience).

But it's very helpful to get independent, outside examples. It moves the conversation past "Google sucks" to "Google sucks because of query X." Sometimes those queries are new, but often what's just as useful is hearing what people dislike about the current results for the search X.

I find it very hard to believe that Google's Matt Cutts would come down from the ivory tower to answer comments on a website.

Google suspended my Google Checkout account because two words in the title of my book (make money editing from home) sent up a flag. No matter how many times I offered to give them a copy of my manuscript, they declined.

The eventual apology was appreciated, as was the full reinstatement, but it doesn't change the fact that I was wrongly accused, wrongly convicted, and had no court of appeal to go to except the very people who shut me down.

I no longer use Gmail, Google Toolbar, Chrome, Google AdSense, Google Checkout, Picasa, Blogger, Feedburner, Google Webmaster Tools, Google as a search engine, or whatever else I can think of. Google violated my terms of service.

Oh, and the nastygrams looked outsourced, and the apology had typos and bad grammar. You guys should hire an editor.

Actually, I'm not done. I didn't do anything wrong. Google admitted this. It was their mistake, not mine. They admitted this in their apology, which I did appreciate.

For my account to be randomly suspended reminds me how much an Act of Google resembles an Act of God. That's what annoyed me so much. Google did evil that day.

And that, to bring it back to the point "Matt Cutts" made, is WHY Google sucks. It can't be fixed.

I find it very hard to believe that Google's Matt Cutts would [...] answer comments on a website.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Matt_Cutts

Another story on the front page of HN today documents how the original paper linking vaccine to autism was a fraud (a downright lie).

Interestingly, when one searches for just "vaccine autism" in Google here are the titles of the first 4 results:

Medical fraud revealed in discredited vaccine-autism study

MMR vaccine controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

'No evidence' for autism-vaccine link (cnn.com)

Journal: Study linking vaccine to autism was fraud - Yahoo! News

There are zero results from content farms in the first 20 results.

So, curiously, on such topics, content from content farms is completely filtered out by Google.

(If one searches for the same topics only on ehow.com for example, the results talk about a "controversy" and say nothing about an actual fraud).

Is the filtering the result of general Page Rank algorithms (pages on eHow on autism receiving less links than pages on cooking or wiring outlets) or are pages already weighted by topic, by Google? ("important topic" => "casual content" bad; "casual topic" => "casual content" ok)

Two examples I see in my history right now are

bsi +lnk scada +foof things i will not

In both cases the results (on www.google.com with a browser running with LANG=de_DE) without the plus are considerably worse, and foof is definitely not edible :-).

Thanks. You said two examples. Was this the single search [bsi +lnk scada +foof things i will not] or two different searches? Usually we write [X] or ["X Y"] to mean doing a search for X or "X Y" at Google, so adding square brackets would help me understand what the two searches were more clearly.

Or were you just frustrated that we assumed "foof" was intended to be "food" unless you added the '+' character to specify an exact match?

Ah, sorry, that should have been two lines, fat fingered the leading two spaces, those should have been

  +foof things i will not
  bsi +lnk scada

Hi Matt,

I noticed you were looking for some examples to spam and thought I would show you some blatant spamming for some real estate searches. I got a job recently in a small town and noticed, as I was searching for real estate in the area, the same type of websites started popping up. I mean, these sites are horrible. I dugg further and I think I uncovered a pretty blatant spam ring. Here are the sites I have found thus far:

www.ogdenutahhomes.com www.utahhomesforsale.com www.kaysvilleutahrealestate.com www.royutrealestate.com www.ogdenrealestate.com www.tooeleutrealestate.com www.smithfieldutahrealestate.com www.utahcornerstone.com www.realestatelogan.com www.realestateinogden.com www.homes4saleinutah.com www.northernutahhomesearch.com www.searchcachehomes.com www.bountifuluthomes.com www.ogdenutahhomesforsale.com www.utahhomesforsale.mp www.loganrealestate.mp www.southernuthomes.com www.retireinlogan.com www.davis.countyutahrealestate.com www.alansharpbarker.com www.realestateprovoutah.com www.slcutrealestate.com www.homesforsalelogan.com www.cachevalleyfsbo.com www.cachevalleyhomesforsale.com www.homesinlogan.com www.homesinloganutah.com www.utahrealhomes.com www.searchloganhomes.com www.liveinlogan.com www.searchcachehomes.com www.providenceutahrealestate.com www.providenceutahhomes.com www.paw.utahcornerstone.com www.hyrumutahrealestate.com

All of these websites seem to be run by the same person. Feel free to pm me if you have any questions. Thanks!

Yes! Something changed in the search algorithm recently, for the worse. I search for X and get Y. Is this documented anywhere?

(I didn't know that a "+" prefix can fix this. Thanks for the info.)

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