
Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches - topcat31
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
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natesm
Has anyone else noticed Google making a lot of autocorrection mistakes
recently? I don't mind the traditional "did you mean" links, but I've been
getting redirected to pages for different queries, with a "did you mean [what
you actually typed]" link.

It's especially a problem with programming because a lot of words that are
"wrong" are actually acronyms or strange library names.

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moultano
If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.

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iron_ball
Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the
excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It
should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially
offensive.

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jakeonthemove
That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...

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nextparadigms
What I dislike the most from recent updates is the preview feature. I find it
completely gets in my way, and it's very easy to unintentionally make it
preview something, when I just want to scan the results. Does anyone else find
that feature useful?

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epoxyhockey
I never understood the usefulness of the preview feature. The only time I find
it marginally interesting is when a website is currently down or had recently
been taken offline. Though, I find the "cache:" query more useful in those
cases anyway.

The preview window does pop-up unexpectedly for me as well. I guess my mouse
pointer wanders over to the right side of the search result every once in a
while, triggering the preview.

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brc
I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links
that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an
underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone
understood it, now it's gone. Boo.

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Matt_Cutts
The cached link is still there. Look for it on the page preview.

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brc
Can't we just have it back where it was?

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jellicle
This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages
from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand.

I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced
search?) if we truly want older pages.

I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages
every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather,
I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.

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frankydp
I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a
result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in
which "freshness" would not improve quality.

Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley
Effect" or new is always better. IMO.

The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this
specific change is overly relevant.

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danilocampos
I hope this works. Searches for error messages and the like are often
cluttered with results from 2009 or earlier, describing troubleshooting steps
that are out of date or unnecessary. At this point I add the current year to
the end of any given troubleshooting search – and even that isn't always
enough.

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jontas
I run into this problem all the time. I usually hit the "More search tools"
link and then limit my search to the past year or so (depending on the issue).

Also including specific version numbers helps as well.. but maybe this update
will make those techniques irrelevant.

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pavel
Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I
used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page,
now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one
else experience a degradation in the quality of results?

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jakeonthemove
Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more
relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with
the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if
I'm logged out of my Google account...

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fred_nada
Yes, i noticed better results outside of personalized search... It is a hassle
to logout thought. I actually use bing for 90% of searches... google is better
at tech searches like mysql questions, but outside of that there results have
gotten more irrelevant and crowded with useless content...

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jakeonthemove
I hope they thought everything through, because there are a lot of cases where
old content is just as good or even better - there are a lot of "timeless"
articles and video out there.

However, when it comes to software/tech/anything fast moving, I'd really like
to see the latest results first. I'm tired of searching for "how to set psa-
proftpd to standalone in plesk" (just a quick example off the top of my head)
and get 5 year old results that have long since stopped being relevant...

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thaumaturgy
Since I never seem to miss a chance to criticize Google:

Thank you, Google. This should make your search results much more helpful.

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chrisguitarguy
The real question: does it matter who "breaks" a story first? Will the folks
who got the story first get to the top of the "fresh" pile even though their
story may be a day older? Or does the most recent content always win?

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untog
I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance:

 _If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s
upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics_

I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems
presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results
about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should
be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned
the dial a little too far.

As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what
News search is for?

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jsnell
> I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems
> presumptuous.

It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous,
but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok.
The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a
couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of
pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the
main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.

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s00pcan
I constantly search for results within the past year to find information
that's actually recent and current instead of "how to do x, circa 200X"

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epoxyhockey
I do the same thing. I use the left-sidebar time range selection and set it to
"past year" for about 50% of my searches.

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agumonkey
So much that I wish it was visible by default, or even more central. So many
times the top results are very high references of outdated things.

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cbr
Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the
early 1990s):

<https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial>

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simon_weber
Glad this is here; I really liked Google realtime when it was around.

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sant0sk1
This is a much welcomed change. I find that I quite often want recency based
searches and blogged a quick solution if you're using Chrome:

[http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-
recen...](http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recency-
based-google-searches-in-chrome/)

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jakeonthemove
They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that
left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was
scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...

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JonnieCache
Hopefully this will help out the perl crew and their problem with stale
tutorials.

The leeds doc is still top result, but hopefully this will make it easier for
them to push new stuff up there.

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3pt14159
I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of
Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.

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kkihara
The real question is, do we have an alternative?

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suivix
It's amusing how the megacorp Google uses the Occupy protests as the main
example of their search changes.

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guimarin
color me unimpressed that they're now able to sort their livecrawl with a
'date' flag. And this seems to simply be a case of firing that filter
automatically for 35% of their searches.

