
Search Still Sucks - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/search-still-sucks/
======
credo
Btw Matt Cutts' statement _"Google's algorithms had started to work; manual
action also taken."_ is weird.
(<http://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/36502687868665856>)

All evidence indicates that JC Penny was ranked #1 until the NYT provided
Google with the evidence that it had collected. Google then acted on the
evidence. As a result of those actions, JC Penny's rank dropped from #1 to
#71.

It is funny that he should say _"Google's algorithms had started to work"_.
Presumably, the algorithm doesn't depend on a New York Times reporter telling
Google that they were being gamed :)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I didn't understand that comment either until I read his comment here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212336>

Algorithmic changes went into play 1.5 weeks ago and had started to drop
JCPenny, then the spam team gave them some cement shoes.

~~~
jdp23
Sounds like Google intervened manually as well as doing algorithmic changes.
How long till they do the same with Demand Media?

------
tomkarlo
At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an
option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real
usable information from others on the quality of the results.

If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go
to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't
know that we necessarily need one site to replace Google; it seems to me that
the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over.

~~~
chris_j
I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my
experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still
find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend
to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow.

Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more
quickly than a Google search?

Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running
program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the
first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the
answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm
interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job
than a Google search.

~~~
tomkarlo
Mea culpa. SO was definitely my weak example there... if they had a better on-
site search it wouldn't be an issue but I guess they mostly just optimize for
Google search. So a lot of the time I end up Googling tech issues, but then
clicking on the SO link because I know there will be multiple answers on that
page instead of just one.

~~~
chris_j
No worries, I also notice that SO comes up in Google results quite a lot and
that's generally how I access it as well so I also do a Google search for tech
issues and then end up clicking on the SO link.

Your post yesterday got me thinking about why Google is still pretty useful
for coding questions but not so for searches of a more commercial nature. I
guess it isn't worth so much money to game Google for the former (Experts
Exchange notwithstanding).

------
bambax
It's funny that someone who just sold out to AOL would choose to trash Demand
Media.

> _If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn’t exist._

Would Associated Content? Would AOL?

\- - -

This is a cheap article that plays with words; it's titled "search still
sucks", which is debatable but "truish", but what it really tries to say is
that search "sucks more and more", which is provably false.

And it's 100% evidence free, too, as is the rule in the new entertaining
noisosphere of blogism.

> _So what is the evidence that search still sucks? Well, you know it’s true,
> just like me._

Mr. Arrington sounds like a priest now; what's the evidence that God exists?
Well, you know it's true, don't you?

\-- Well, no, I don't. What else do you have?

\-- Err, nothing.

------
zengeek
I was wondering why there were so few negative comments here on Michael
Arrington posts.I have just read his biography on wikipedia.

Now I feel very naive. It Must be obvious I am new here. I understand no one
here want to piss off this guy (like in my other comment). At least no one
trying to launch a startup.

Ok now I need a new account.

------
photon_off
Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social
bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly
recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the
results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have
bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site
or site with crap content.

I think Google results could vastly be improved if they tied together their
normal rankings with a "how many people have bookmarked this URL (and to some
extent, URLs from this domain)" metric. I've worked closely with Delicious'
set of data, and it's nothing short of incredible. Billions of instances of
people categorizing sites and vouching for their quality are going unused in
the search space.

~~~
mooism2
If black hat seos started to believe Google was paying specific attention to
Delicious bookmarks, Delicious would be flooded with fake accounts faster than
you can say "link farm".

History of search:

1\. New company releases new search engine, better than the competition
because it pays attention to a previously ignored signal.

2\. Seos work out how to game the signal.

3\. New search engine is now as crappy as the search engines it replaced.

Really, internet search is like macroeconomics: soon after you understand {how
to prevent recessions, how to find the best webpages}, the problem vanishes
and is replaced by something even more complex and incomprehensible.
Furthermore, this has already happened.

~~~
lsc
This has interesting implications, I think, in the business of search.

It's almost like a negative network effect. The more people that use a search
engine, the more people try to game it, and the less useful it becomes for
finding what you want. This seems like it'd make things much easier for new
competitors like duck-duck-go to bring a superior product... at least until
they gained enough market share to be worth SEO time gaming.

------
noonespecial
_Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are
popping up to try to fix that._

This is how Google is finally toppled. Not by a "google killer" or another
giant like Bing, but by a thousand tiny niche services that get "X" search
right.

~~~
pessimist
This is true, but it has always been true. Google has always sucked for
product review searches, local service vendors (try finding a plumber
anyone?), travel searches etc. The odd thing is why people continue to use it
for all these things. Perhaps the ads?

------
soulclap
'Search still sucks' seems like quite an exaggeration when the average user
(whoever that is) isn't even noticing any 'decline'.

I usually always find what I am looking for when using Google and haven't
noticed any major changes recently when it comes to the search results. Maybe
because I am taking some of my searches straight to respective sites like
Wikipedia, IMDB, Discogs but still.

Also, ever since day one a bit of 'common sense' helps determining which
results are actually useful (and I am all right with that).

------
zengeek
Apparently, this blog author has been ousted as "bribed by Microsoft for
secret advertising disguised in posts"

There has been a lot "google search sucks" submission from Techcrunch lately.
This was starting to feel a little weird. So I googled "Michael Arrington
Microsoft" and got this :

[http://techrights.org/2010/02/07/michael-arrington-
microsoft...](http://techrights.org/2010/02/07/michael-arrington-microsoft-
bribes/)

Are people aware of this ? is it old news ? Is HN being spammed ?

~~~
itg
There's a lot of "google search sucks" lately because google search sucks. I
would also be wary of techrights.org when it comes to regarding anything
Microsoft.

------
rsardeha
Google loves what you guys call spam because it allows Google to generate more
revenues.

When a content farm pushes first pages results this causes the real
manufacturers and businesses to use Google's advertising platform to reach
their customers.

When you're looking for a kitchen appliance It's better for Google to return a
landing page filled with Google Adsense ads instead of the official website of
one of these appliance manufactures. Again for the same reason mentioned
above.

It's all about the revenues.

\- Reza Sardeha

~~~
stcredzero
What this _really_ means, is that Google should eliminate the middleman.
Google shouldn't fight content farms. It should become the unstoppable
juggernaut among content farms and do this by being actually useful and
creating pages with value.

------
swingley
Everything is amazing right now and nobody's happy:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk>

------
stcredzero
I'm afraid to say something like this, but some linkspam/scraper sites are
verging on looking _almost useful_.

I was trying to Google references to Greek Playwright Aristophanes' use of
fart jokes (yes, seriously I was looking for that) and I came across this
linkspam page:

<http://wn.com/2934_Aristophanes> (seems to have dropped in Google ranking)

For one thing, this site doesn't offend my eyes. It doesn't immediately insult
my intellect, either. After the first second, though, it still proves to be
just as useless.

In a way, what Cuil was trying to do was to apply enough AI to make an
actually very useful scraper site. What would the world be like if such sites
actually existed?

<http://wn.com/linkspam>

(Seems like the site is just trawling through my cookies to make guesses about
what I'd like.)

------
Strunk
I totally agree! Googles search results is starting to suck. If I'm sitting
with an errorcode for some sort of program, trying to search it on google,
will just give me a couple of random generated botsites. I have moved
permanently to Duckduckgo. :-)

------
jdp23
I thought this was a great point: "When companies start to flail they nearly
always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then the talk
about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one."

------
hammock
Is this an article about how search sucks? Or is it an article about how
Google can only do 50 things right instead of 500?

Google /= search, it's just one engine. No need to throw all your eggs in one
basket.

------
tristanperry
This is why I think it'd be great to see Google release all the 40,000+ test
queries which Google/Matt Cutts took back in 2000. It would help to put to
rest some of the "Google is regressing and getting worse" debate one way or
the other (and I suspect by showing that such talk is more sensationalist than
accurate; I think Google search has improved a fair amount).

The article does make some interesting points, and I am a bit confused at the
supposed sequence of events with the JC Penny/NY Times story. Plus it does
raise the question of why a company who previously has had some SEO issues was
- apparently - able to game Google's rankings in such a major way (using such
spammy methods) without Google picking up on it for months.

That's a conclusion point from the article which I think is a well founded
one.

As for the other points in the article's conclusion though:

>> _"But all the evidence suggests otherwise. Demand Media is worth $1.6
billion, and their entire business is based on pushing cheap, useless content
into Google to get a few stray links. If Google was good at search, Demand
Media wouldn't exist."_

 _"wouldn't exist"_ is subjective. If Demand Media weren't pumping out
content, what would rank in its place? Part of Demand Media's success is that
they are 'filling in the gaps' and covering content surrounding keywords which
don't really warrant much competition. Sure this isn't always the case - and
Demand Media's sites do sometimes rank highly for some rubbish content with
other alternatives available - but in many cases it does seem to be at least
part of the reason for DM's success.

Do I like some of Demand Media's content? No.

Do I like that Demand Media seem happy to have some pages with more adverts
than content? No.

Do I think that Google et al should not even index some of their pages (some
of which can at current rank fairly well)? Yes.

Do I think that there's many good alternatives to some of DM's content? NO.
Unfortunately.

>> _"And Bing wouldn't be making solid gains in search market share."_

I might have different ideas about what "solid gains" means, although to me a
percentage point here or there doesn't amount to much.

If - say - a Presidential candidate seen his/her opinion polls increase by 1
or 2%, you wouldn't see a bunch of stories saying how the candidate is making
"solid gains".

In-fact, if a mainstream media source run an article on (say) a political
party who seen a 2% rise in their opinion polls - and thus concluded that said
party is making "solid gains" - I'd feel intellectually insulted and suspect
the mainstream media source of bias.

So I definitely feel that this conclusion point is sensationalism (and
inaccurate sensationalism, at that) and nothing more.

So all in all, a decent article which makes some decent points (at times). But
it does also feel a bit of a shallow 'staying in the bandwagon' type of
article, too.

------
pasbesoin
If "the customer's always right", then, for the current search situation, you
have to ask: Who's the customer?

\--

P.S. Google: I'd accept, gratefully, as a stopgap, being able to specify
multiple "site:foo" parameters. I don't know what the computational (or
financial) impact to you would be.

(So far, I've held off trying browser extensions to accomplish this, but I
guess I can start looking for one having a good reputation.)

~~~
vanessafox
If you want this ability for one-off searches, you can use the OR operator.

site:<http://news.ycombinator.com> OR site:stackoverflow.com <query>

I don't know if there's a max # of sites you can add. I tried it with three
and it seemed to work great.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=site:searchengineland.com+OR+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:searchengineland.com+OR+site:ninebyblue.com+vanessa+fox#sclient=psy&q=site%3Aninebyblue.com+OR+site%3Asearchengineland.com+OR+site%3Aradar.oreilly.com+%22vanessa+fox%22&fp=649be7798417a8e0)

(Yes, I did an ego search. Isn't that the best way to know if the results are
likely accurate? :)

If there's a set of sites you want to search through often, you can set up a
custom search engine for what you describe. For instance, see this page:

<http://www.toddnemet.com/>

~~~
pasbesoin
I've tried that [before], but with multiple parameters, I simply got zero
results. I then enclosed the site:foo OR site:bar within parentheses, leaving
the rest of the query outside parentheses. Whichever site:foo came first would
be matched, but only it appeared to be matched. Subsequent site:bar, etc.
parameters did not produce any matches in the results.

I'll have a look at your links, in a minute -- probably should have done that
first.

EDIT: Well, your second link sure works. I wonder what I was doing wrong. When
I saw someone else('s or s') comments online to the effect that it didn't
work, I assumed that was why my own experience failed.

I'm in serious need of some coffee, at the moment. Thanks for correcting my
mis-impression; I look forward to straightening it out in my mind and taking
advantage of this feature.

~~~
vanessafox
It could be that you were using a lowercase or. It has to be all caps OR.

(lowercase or just uses "or" as one of the search terms, which I think
actually is considered a stop word and is then ignored.)

And I'm always a supporter of the more coffee recommendation.

