

Google Search: Change is Coming - Steveism
http://mashable.com/2012/03/15/google-search-major-overhaul/

======
victork2
Well Google, a word of warning that will probably never be seen. I have loved
you almost since you started. You have been a very good companion, which never
crashed, (almost) never disappointed me for many years. Then you changed, you
thought that adding your dumb immediate search after every keystroke would be
a good idea (I hate being wasteful). Then you thought that adding some social
component in it would be a good idea but I didn't care much about it. Now if
there's more "Social bullshit flavor" in your result, I'm out, I am going to
find another Search engine that suits better my needs.

Joke apart, Google has always been the way I search for KNOWLEDGE. Because of
this "Social trend", it tends to become more and more aimed at searching for
TRENDS. And they are two totally different things and pretty much...
incompatible. Don't mix it up Google!

For any other additional information about search or more relevant results,
I'm in!

~~~
freehunter
While I really do like the social search feature (seeded with the Hacker News
Google+ circle, I see things other people believe are relevant rather than
relying on SEO), I agree with you on the instant search. Especially since they
enabled it in Chrome's URL bar.

If I type "pho" and hit enter, I expect to be taken to search results about
"pho", but instead Google automatically fills in the rest and searches for
"phone". I then have to backspace and do another search just for pho. Instant
search on Google.com is infuriating as well in that it doesn't work reliably.
It will guess three or four times as to what I'm searching for as I type, then
give up and say "hit enter to perform your search". That's what I want to do
anyway! In the meantime, I've been distracted by a flashing page while I'm
typing.

------
debacle
I was thinking about this on the way to work this morning while Steve Martin
was talking about his experiences with twitter on NPR.

The problem with search right now is that PageRank is not at all a good
indicator of individualizing social search results, and contrary to
Facebook's, reddit's, or the new, hot social network's goals, the social
network ecosystem is constantly evolving. In ten years, I hope, for the sake
of progress, that the social networks we have now are mostly dead, relegated
to the core of dedicated users similar to sites like metafilter, MySpace and
kuro5hin.

What I'm awaiting is a dedicated, personalized (but not 'personalized' or
Personalized) social search engine that has enough implicit value for user
buy-in. A search engine with enough context to make the facebook wall
obsolete.

This hybrid search that Google is attempting wont have the value that they
think it does - Wikipedia already does that, and better, without ads. Google
needs to step back and think about what made their _approach_ to search a
killer app ten years ago and try and understand how to apply that value to the
search needs of people today, instead of trying to apply their _model_ from
ten years ago to the search needs of people today.

------
brudgers
> _"In practice, that means that over the next few months you will begin to
> see subtly different results to searches"_

Every time I notice subtle changes to my search results with Google, it's
because they are worse [in the sense that they are less relevant to the actual
terms I have searched for].

> _'"the most important thing about an artist is his greatest works."'_

That doesn't mean they are the most relevant results for my search terms.

~~~
freehunter
Perhaps there are dozens or hundreds of improvements over the years you
haven't noticed because they were better? People are going to notice things
getting subtly worse, not things getting subtly better. Even if they are.

~~~
brudgers
There might of been, but in general I have found that Google's search engine
pays much less attention to the actual terms I entered than to what it
expected me to enter, compared to the more literal behavior years ago.

When Google search first started suggesting that I had mistyped a term, it
still returned results for the mistyping, and just notified me of the
possibility. Now, it assumes that I mistyped a search term and returns results
of what it thinks I requested. [edit] At times this is helpful but the times
when it isn't more than offset any benefit [/edit]

In the old days, Google search would actual give me results from all over the
world for my search terms, now it filters them for the US - searching for a
foreign term or something that one knows is on a foreign site is a real PITA,
these days.

It's all driven, not so much by relevance to me, but by relevance to
advertisers. There's little money to be made if "German Bakery" returns a
website in Berlin compared to if it returns a map to the one in my local
Publix supermarket.

------
Natsu
Interesting. I wonder if I happened to see some test of this a long while
back? You see, I was looking up the specific gravity of a whole bunch of
different things for something (I couldn't find them all on Wolfram Alpha).

Then, out of the blue, Google started giving me the answers directly, saying
that it had calculated some number by averaging X sources. But that's not the
odd part.

The odd part? The Google search page then asked me if that number was correct.
I've never seen that before or since.

~~~
RobAtticus
Something like this?:
<https://www.google.com/search?q=specific+gravity+of+gold>

~~~
driax
Please provided a picture when discussing google results. It's really
difficult to know what your point is when I'm not sure what Google returns to
you. The above links seems like a normal search result to me (without any
factual google-provided results)

~~~
Natsu
Here's a picture of what he's talking about: <https://imgur.com/HBt5f>

But I saw something different back then, because it had a little yes/no
selection asking if I thought the information was accurate. I have not seen
that question except for that one time.

~~~
RobAtticus
Clicking on "Feedback" presents you with "Is this information accurate? Yes
No"

~~~
Natsu
When I saw it originally, the question about accuracy was right next to the
search box. I didn't click on anything to get it. But that's interesting. I
guess it got integrated at some point.

------
kiloaper
>As further outlined in a Wall Street Journal story on the subject on
Thursday, a search for “Lake Tahoe” will produce “key attributes” that Google
knows about the lake, including its altitude, location, salt content and
average temperature. The query “What are the 10 largest lakes in California?,”
meanwhile, would yield an answer instead of just links to relevant sites.

Sounds like WolframAlpha.

~~~
icebraining
They have been doing that for some time now. Typing "firefox license", for
example, gives you an answer right at the top.

------
sawyer
Sounds like it's time for someone to build pg's search engine for the top
10,000 hackers. Google's entering the uncanny valley; it's ai will be alright,
but it won't be faster or better than my ability to parse a page of relevant
links from 'old Google'.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Raises hand. :-)

Just saying that there are folks building search engines, blekko.com and
duckduckgo.com are examples.

Many people share your dislike for the privacy aspects (or lack there of) to
which Google has gone.

[disclaimer: per my bio I work at blekko.com and I consider myself friends
with Gabe over at duckduckgo :-) doesn't take away from the fact that there
are exemplars of people building new search engines]

------
holri
The search algorithm should not try to understand people. People should be
enabled to understand the algorithm.

Google is heading the false direction.

------
Steveism
>"It’s unclear how the plan overlaps, if at all, with Google’s other recent
search initiative, Google plus Your World, which integrates Google+ results
into standard searches."

I would have to assume that going forward any tweak to the Google user
experience will in some way benefit their social initiative. It seems to
matter a lot to them.

------
guimarin
I'm curious what will happen to queries like, 'Thai'. Will they show me local
Thai Restaurants? Will they show me travel deals to Thailand? Will these
'attributes' tell me something of Thai culture. God I would hate to have to be
working on the query parser with these NLP type changes coming down the path.

------
jimmy2times
_For instance, a Google search can distinguish a search for “New York” as
opposed to one for “New” and “York.”_

OMG, what kind of sophisticated AI did they use to accomplish this? I'm
thinking random forests mixed with neural networks and SVMs.

------
javadyan
Are they trying to turn google into wolfram alpha?

~~~
mhitza
At least it will be suited for the large audience.

