
Google Gives Search a Refresh - revorad
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304459804577281842851136290-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html
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thegyppo
Trying to be more like Wolfram imo, there's still lots of searches where
Google fails for me, for example doing a search for "est time" currently gives
the time in Eastern Kenya. Wolfram gives me the EST time in Australia (because
that's where I am), if I change the query slightly to "east usa time" then in
Google I get nothing, in Wolfram they show me the difference between the EST
time in Australia vs the USA.

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mayanksinghal
I am from India and I get "6:37 Thursday (CDT) - Time in East, IA, USA" as a
result. I think there is some component of personalization that might be
affecting your search results.

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ttt_
And that's how google broke search in my eyes.

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18pfsmt
Until a few weeks ago when it shutdown, I used Scroogle to proxy my searches,
and it gave great results. 50 plain links without any other distracting
content. Of course, they simply queried google servers with an IE6 UA, but it
still allowed for all the search operators. I had been doing that for the last
6 years, and I must say I am at loss these days. I use DDG now, and it seems
adequate...

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ttt_
Using DDG, quite often I don't even have to click any search results to find
what I was looking for (usually a quick documentation snippet).

I feel that in old times I had that with google too, nowadays I often have to
scroll around and even go to next pages looking for it.

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electrichead
"Catch up to Siri in mobile search"? That must be some kind of hidden
advertisement/typo/fanboyism.

Unfortunately though, there is definitely something wrong with Google results
ever since the Panda update. It is very difficult to get any meaningful
technical results now. I feel they had to dumb down search to be able to serve
up a bigger variety of results.

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adgar
If possible, could you provide example queries with poor results? The quality
teams are always looking to improve results, and examples of queries with poor
results are the quickest way to improvement. Or, at the very least, could you
narrow down "technical results" to a particular field of inquiry?

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mitakas
Someone was scanning for a crazy backdoor, using this: /?dgd=1. Try searching
for /?dgd=1 or "/?dgd=1" (with or without verbatim on).

You are going to get results about:

    
    
      dgd-1
      dgd 1
      d g d 1
      dgd#1
      dgd (1

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adgar
I figured most folks knew that Google doesn't support arbitrary
punctuation/strings. Do any search engines? I tried bing and duckduckgo and
got nothing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the quality folks would love to be able to
support searching the web for arbitrary strings... but that's not something
any search engine can provide right now, is it? It's orders of magnitude
harder than current web search offerings.

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kevinpacheco
Google Code Search supported [1] regular expressions. Google Web Search can
match punctuation in some cases, but it seems to do best when the symbols are
at the beginning or end of the search term. Examples:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%22c%2B%2B%22>

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%24100001..%24199999>

[1] Actually, Google Code Search is still around.
<http://code.google.com/codesearch>

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adgar
Google Code Search does not (and never did) search the entirety of the web.
Its index is orders of magnitude smaller.

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zerop
So not just index the page while crawling but also some NLP? Good luck!! For
direct results I like Wolframalpha.

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cheatercheater
I am surprised no one brought up the most important issue: Google are
transitioning from content delivery to content production. This is a huge
shift and for me shows the first signs of trouble; content producers will be a
much lower-quality job at Google, and it will need lots of people to do that.
It feels like Google is slowly becoming Microsoft.

