Google Search Blog

Google is useful to more people, which means it's less useful to people who are happy with things like the O Reilly Google Hacks.

There's some switch somewhere to force it into "Literal" or "verbatim" mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html (These are the posts that give me the '1 in 600 searches used the + operator correctly' factoid.)

I think my current problems with Google are

1) Lack of predictability. I have no idea what terms might be substituted, or what they'll get subbed for. I don't know what terms get stemmed or not.

2) Recentism. Google is great at finding things from this year. Finding stuff from before 2000 is harder, and before 1990 is really tricky. (I don't have any examples! Normally I keep them.)[1]

3) Desire to return many hits. I'm happy if I enter a search term and don't get many hits. I'd rather have a few hits, rather than many hits that are less relevant. I'd rather have a few really bad hits, and thus know that I need to tweak my search terms, than get many sort of okay hits.

But for most people Google is great. Having said that, I switched to mostly DDG and I really like it, except I'd like to be able to force a more English (and not US) result cloud; and I'd like to be able to enter a term, have it translated into other languages, and search for those. This would be a way to break out of the English speaking bubble.

[1] I find it weirdly…

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough.

1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate.

2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times.

3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG.

4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved.

I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

I wonder if Google is getting trapped near a local peak.

I watched the video they released on improving search quality yesterday (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-uncut.html) and was initially impressed that they gave so much thought to slightly improving a small subset of 0.1% of queries. That meeting must have had 40 people attending!

But afterwards it left me with the feeling that Google is becoming so big and entrenched in old ways of doing things, that they may not be focusing enough on the next big improvement in search. Penalties and heuristics can only go so far -- eventually they'll need something approaching AI -- and if any company can do it it's Google.

Have neither of you heard of verbatim search?

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html

Or turning off Search Plus Your World?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAALU/ZFkWokAloIM/s400/Toggle.png

No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?