

Why Google is broken for debugging - montanalow
http://www.omniref.com/blog/blog/2014/04/08/why-google-is-broken-for-debugging/

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dragonshed
It's nice to see they've tried to work around the soft 404 problem in their
docs, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's just another case of how Google has
optimized out a use case that only developers rely on.

I've voiced similar complaints about how google parses my search query, but
they seem to fall on deaf ears.

I don't know exactly when, but at some point between 2009 and 2010, google
stopped allowing punctuation in exact string matches. An example, say
searching for issues related to C# attributes: The first few results for the
query "[StringLength]" are for C++'s string::length method, Java's
String.Length, JavaScript, etc etc.

Google used to provide uncannily accurate results for such queries and
apparently no one noticed when it was changed.

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thisisnotatest
I'm an engineer at Google who worked on the query parser code in 2009 and
2010. I can assure you that at no point around then did punctuation like
square brackets get used, inside or outside quotation marks. The results
changing from results that suited your intent to results that didn't must have
been caused by other changes to the ranking algorithm or the Web as a whole
over those years that happened to be unlucky for you.

Punctuation is a huge challenge for us. We can't simply index all the
punctuation on every web page on the internet -- think of the blowup of our
index! Think how much slower our search pipeline would be! But we're working
on it. Now we recognize some common punctuation uses cases like @ and #.
Compare the search results for mattcutts vs. @mattcutts, or obama vs. #obama.
We'll keep working on the other ones. The programming ones hinder us coders a
lot too. :-)

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ASneakyFox
I google for exceptions and stack traces all the time. This person must be
doing it wrong.

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timr
You may search for things, but you probably overestimate the number of times
you actually find anything relevant. Most of the time, you'll find a page
about the exception class itself (fine; not very useful), or you'll repeat
your search with something more specific, and get either nothing, or you'll
get some blog post (or worse: forum question) talking about how someone once
encountered an exception, without any relevant answer.

What we're trying to do here is make it possible for people to search for
exception messages, and find the code where those exceptions actually get
_raised_. It's something I've wanted for a while, personally.

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jsight
Maybe this should say that Ruby exceptions are hard to Google for? I search
for Java Exceptions rather frequently, and frequently find good results.

~~~
timr
It's true that we're only Ruby (for now...), but I've had the same problems in
every language I've ever used.

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michaelbuckbee
Google aggressively tries to not show error and exception results as bad
actors could potentially use them to attack a site. For example, if a
particular error returned was indicative that a site wasn't safely handling
SQL queries, etc.

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dekhn
I read this article out of curiosity and from what I can it's just a bunch of
unrelated words strung together.

