

25 Things I Hate About Google - hackscribe
http://searchengineland.com/25-things-i-hate-about-google-revisited-5-years-later-67969

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pohl
Here's my pet peeve that I don't see on the list: not giving me the results
for what I searched for the first time around. For example, yesterday I
searched for "OCUnit coverage" or something similar and Google said "showing
results for 'JUnit coverage'". (I don't mind suggesting another search query,
but I expect the first hit to assume that I didn't mistype.)

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radq
I actually like that feature. I generally tend to know how my search queries
sound but not how they are spelled, so this gets me to where I want to go
faster. I imagine this is also true for a large number of people, so I doubt
it would be changed.

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Pahalial
I had to stop at the 'hate' for cached pages. He doesn't really expand on it
at the linked article, either: [http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-
moving-forward-...](http://daggle.com/search-engines-permissions-moving-
forward-in-copyright-battles-229)

In fact, he does not put forth any argument at all. There is talk of the fact
that it was indeed ruled 'fair use', and he essentially just disagrees and
considers it evil, and expects that to have some weight.

I fundamentally disagree: it is fair use, I have personally found the feature
useful more than once, and I really just don't see it as evil. As he mentions,
publishers extra-concerned about their content and copyright can opt out; for
everyone else, it has let the web be a little more stateful. Letting people
disappear controversial content from pages early on in a public backlash just
does not strike me as having any benefit.

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sullivandanny
I don't believe it is fair use to make an entire copy of someone else's
material, if you've made no transformative change to it.

I understand there is an opt-out. My post on daggle.com goes into great depth
about that. However, I don't think that's the way Google should operate.

Google just assumed that it was OK to reprint material through its cached
pages; many have felt that was presumptuous. So far, they've been OK with it
-- but it remains something that colors them as evil in some quarters.

I get you don't agree with that, but others do view it that way. And it sure
jumped out to bite Google when it levied allegations that Bing was copying
Google.

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Groxx
> _Google still does plenty of testing. And we still get messages from people
> who wonder if they’ve been hit by malware. But it feels like this is
> happening less. Ideally, the company would regularly advise people of when a
> test is underway._

Have they not heard of "New Coke"? Constant, minor flux is accepted much more
readily than periods of non-change followed by a big change.

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chris_j
#16 Blogger Being Free

The author suggests charging a token amount (eg $1) in order to discourage
junk. This would certainly have discouraged me from using my (Blogger) blog to
send pictures and news home to family and friends when I go travelling. Not
that paying a nominal fee would be a problem in itself. Rather, the
administrative overhead of making the payment would have driven me to
Wordpress or something else. The cost of making a small payment is not just
the value of the payment, it is the cost in terms of time of making the
payment and the time spent checking my credit card statement. I certainly
can't agree with this suggestion, especially when Blogger has so much
competition.

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bluekeybox
Point #1 annoys me a lot. It would be possible to perform many interesting
analyses on your own (think Venn diagrams, association graphs on natural
language) if the numbers were accurate. But they are not.

I actually heard first-hand from a Google employee an explanation for why
these numbers are like that. She said something like, "they are only
estimates." Well the point is, if these estimates are as inaccurate as they
are, why put them up at all? Doing so is almost dishonest-like.

I almost have a feeling (warning: getting into conspiracy territory here) that
the search recall numbers are inaccurate on purpose, so that no third-party
analytics could be built using them.

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dstein
I tend to agree. SEO is a disease that makes Google lots of money, but is
destroying the ability to find anything. Keywords simply do not work anymore.
I have a feeling that there are probably 5-10 startups out there working on
this and at least a few are going to come up with some seriously compelling
alternatives. The search+ads sector is absolutely RIPE for disruption.

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tblueski
This was a good post. #2 was the most annoying to me. I noticed that the main
problem has to do with Chrome remembering your user behavior which affects
your results.

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tblueski
One other one. Showing page results that don't have all the words listed on
that page that were within my keywords.

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karolisd
What's keeping someone from making a search engine that doesn't have these
flaws?

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rokhayakebe
Assumptions. Engineers are confident that building a search engine requires
thousands of servers, indexing the entire web, coming up with some super
complex algorithm etc...

Maybe we need a couple of guys who do not know their limitations and are ready
to approach search from a different angle.

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dexen
Perhaps the author of DuckDuckGo[1] did not know about those limitations...

As far as I know, this search engine uses both own crawlers and some external
sources of data. One person team did it.

\----

[1] <http://duckduckgo.com/>

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neild
By "some external sources of data", you mean "Bing". DDG's primary data source
is Bing, via the Yahoo search APIs.

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bauchidgw
hate: google places (silly aggregator site hArdcoded into the google serps)
hate: google custom seatch api (with a hundred (!!!!) searches free / day)
instead of the proper google search api

