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Digging Holes in Google
Kurt LoVerde writes "Though google has become synonymous with searching, the folks over at MSN have written up an interesting article on our favorite search engine's pitfalls. Included among these are a tendency to skew results toward shopping, a lack of diversity for searches containing synonyms and its impact on research."
Real links on the www.msn.com home page today:
And they show their socialist bent away from shopping with their hardhitting piece:
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Wow, sounds like those Google guys AND the MSN guys are biased. For shame! We at Slashdot poke fun at you!
Not that MSN doesn't have a vested interest in some other search engine or anything.
Google is infallible.
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
Aren't microsoft on the verge of releasing their googleslaying search engine (or perhaps just search marketing) on the world.
How nice on an impartial journalistic source to pick holes in google which are almost certainly specific areas which microsoft has chosen to optimise.
Wait till Microsoft kill off Google and we have no choice!
They'll be ten times worse.
Hey! You got a permit for that?
We tend to forget that:
1. Just because it's not found on the Internet, does not mean that it doesn't exist.
2. Just because it's found on the Internet, does not necessarily make it true.
.sig
"And when I type in my name, like, I don't come up! MSN is better!"
They actually ripped off Dr. Garfield. The article should have mentioned that.
In case it gets slashdotted, here's the google cache of the page (heh)
e =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fslate.msn.com %2Fid%2F2085668%2F
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&i
No Norm, those are your safety glasses; I'll wear my own thanks...
I won't say it. It's too obvious...
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
Well, since Microsoft has already announced plans to try to topple Google as a search engine, I'm pretty much going to take anything that they say with a grain of salt, if I don't just ignore them completely.
Google does an excellent job with their primary searches, their news siphoning, and their froogle.google.com service. I've found more useful results through Google than I have through all of the other search engines that I've used over the years combined. Sometime I'll have to try out their newsgroup tool.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
One of the flaws is a seeming preference towards articles rather than books. Hopefully Amazon's upcoming book text search will fill the gap left by google's seeming inability to find results from books.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Gee... Microsoft complaining about the competition beating them? When does THAT ever happen?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
And we're supposed to believe that MSN Search's results won't be skewed toward MSN Shopping and MSN Content? Google may not be perfect, but at least it's independent of the industry giants. For now anyway.
It does seem true that when you are looking for information on a product, that 9 out of every 10 results will be a page trying to sell you the item, not a page with useful information about the product (beyond the normal marketing speak you get when someone is trying to sell you something).
A search for Apple brings up a full page of Apple computer related links (The article says not one apple link appears on the first page)
"look for apple and you have to troll through three pages of ... before you find apple computer ..."
Um, how about using more than one keyword?
"apple computer" brings www.apple.com as the FIRST link.
I imagine if I look in msn.com for "battery" I won't find detailed schematics of NiMH batteries either. Holy shit, are they paying these people to write this shit?
Heck, even in grade school when we had to use CD encyclopedia's we were taught to use more than one keyword.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
IAALS.
I would read the article, but if I check the page with Firebird there is no article. I get the header, an ad, and links to other stories though.
As a matter of fact, I can't even remember what the story text was or what the linked article said.
Is it interesting how two nouns, Slashdot and Google, have become verbs?
Those are some pretty weak allegations.
The jist of the article is that if you give google a one (common) word search term, that the results may not be as precise as you want. For instance, if you want the nutritional content of an apple, and you put "apple" into Google, you're going to get a bunch of hits for things that don't have what you're looking for.
I'm sure a lot of you are saying "duh" right now.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hmmm.... seems to me the author of the article is not very good at searching for things. Typically, you want something more specific than "apple" in your search. If I looked for apple in the library, I am sure I would find a lot of things that I am not necessarily interested in.
You will never "find" time for anything. You must "make" it.
Is that they take up to two months to update their search results...last Google Dance was in June
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
M$ wouldn't skew peoples' views just to turn the tide of consumers toward their (shoddy) products and services, would they? Nevar! Why would they ever do such a thing?
Maybe try searching with "flower gardening" next time.
word.
Can you spell F-U-D? I knew that you could.
I think we will see this go the way of MS Bob, "Trusted Computing", MSN as a popular ISP, etc.
You ever notice that with the exception of hardware, most people only use Microsoft products as they are forced to?
The only reason people in the outside world use it is because even they feel like they HAVE to use Word, Windows, Excel, etc. When it comes to options in other parts of life, most people recognize that MS sucks donkey balls.
(Interesting side note: I used to work for Blue Cross of California. This was back in the NT 4.0 days. BCC has a support contract with MS.
A co-worker of mine took an NT server, set it up professionally to interface with the network as a real server, then installed MS Bob on it.
He promptly called Microsoft for tech support, and used the "Bob" terminology: "Yes, I'm having trouble getting the IP stack up. I keep telling the dog inside the living room to connect to the outside world, but he just keeps barking at me and asking if I want to make a document." My friend played dumb, only referring to MS Bob jargon as if it were the operating system
Needless to say, the call lasted many hours while the MS tech tried to trouble-shoot the problem using as much of the MS Bob terminology as possible.)
JoeLinux
I've actually been having better search results lately with http://www.teoma.com For my seraches it gives me a lot less chaff than Google to dig through to find what I'm really looking for...
Mod me down if you must but this article is crap. Sure Google is going to give you several pages of links to Apple Computer when you search for 'apple' - that's the way the system is supposed to work. However, if you do a multi-word search for something specific - like 'kixtart audit software', you're going to start seeing success. A search for 'apple trees' finds the top four links pointing to great sites that each link to more sites on apples. Same thing for 'tulips' - 'planting tulips' brings up several relevant links within the top 10. Moral of the story is the same as it is everywhere - GIGO.
Well, of course it doesn't! A search for apples, however, is much more useful.
This is just a case of user error, nothing more.
Remember when the only search engines were archie and Altavista (the old altavista.digital.com, not the "new" one.) Well I certainly do. Google was a quantum-leap improvement over any of them; spidering had been tried with other search engines, but Google made it work. While it certainly has gotten LOTS more commercialized since I first used it, it's still better than anything else out there. I just hope they can stay off of the slippery slope to being clogged with ads.
With the size and complexity of the Internet as we know it, single word search terms like "apple" are completely stupid. I think the reporter was just screwing around with Google and noticed that the publishing deadline was approaching. Sure, there are some unique words that make sense to use as a single term search, but anyone who has used a search engine for more than 3 seconds knows to qualify the search somehow.
As far as shopping results, that's the character of the web today. Lots of commercial interests. It takes money to maintain a web presence, no matter what Geocities tells you. Google is just presenting you with what it's got, really.
Finally, a lot more papers are published than books. It's not surprising that you don't get a lot more hits on book-printed resources.
This is more interesting as a statement on what the Internet has become, rather than what Google might be showing you while filtering other things out.
Unfortunately, computers can't read the minds of dumb people yet....so the rest of the world will need to settle with flowers -shop so that most pages they find are not shops... Searching for something as generic as 'flowers' is the same as searching for 'car'. We typically don't walk into a library anymore and know there is no place to buy flowers there. We know that we're in a world where the Internet is a portal to a) buying and b) information. (Might I add that I think most people buy flowers more often than they grow them?)
--<Mike>--
Apple
... Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations. 1-800-MY-APPLE Find Job Opportunities
at Apple. Visit other Apple sites around the world: Choose... ...
Description: Apple's main homepage.
Category: Computers>Systems>Apple>Macintosh
www.apple.com/ - 18k - Jul 20, 2003 - Cached - Similar pages - Stock quotes: AAPL
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Just last night I was looking for information on whether the Arial font is trademarked by Microsoft (its not). Just try putting a font name into google. I hit on every page that had a font name="Arial" tag in it!
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I don't find Google has a tendency to direct me towards shopping at all.
What I do hate though, is when I search for a band's lyrics, Google gives me a few dozen fan pages before the official (and I'd say a lot more relevent) page ever shows up. This is really annoying when you don't know if the band (or anything else for that matter) has an official page (sometimes it's some idiotic combination like www.band-something-something.pick a tld).
Well, if you search for 'apple', don't be surprised when the first 50 links refer to the Apple Macintosh Computer in one way or another. The smart person does then exclude the terms 'compuer' and 'macintosh' from the search term, and voila, a usable result. The not-so-smart (msn) person calls google biased.
The same goes for the dvd player. Add 'review' to your search query.
And the same goes for the pdf thing. Just include 'book' in your search term.
I think the msn people didn't quite figure out how a search engine works.
Point 1: Flowers. Answer: Instead of typing "tulips" when you really want gardening tips, try "tulips tips" and you will get what you want.
Point2: Apple. Answer: Instead of typing "apple" which is a very common word and product and name, try typing what you actually want, "Apple Computer."
Point 3: If you're looking for a book. Try a library. That is where people put books. That is how people make money on books.
Now, given that your points are complete stupid, I feel as if your article was meant towards a 2 year old that doesn't know the differece between "apple" and "aldkfja." That's because they can't type or read yet.
So, Google is brilliant if you *actually* supply it with what you are looking for. I guarantee you that when I want information about a company which has the same name as a common fruit, I will be a little more specific.
This was the most useless article I've wasted my time reading.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Google changes so fast and so often, it seems nearly pointless to put a critique like this in writing - even if everything in it is correct now, it won't be in a month or so.
Sure, we all know it's a competitor-bashing piece, but for me, that the clincher.
This story was posted on LISNews.com last week. There's about one story a week on LISNews.com that shows up later on Slashdot (and sometimes vice-versa). It's a popular Weblog in Slashcode that has library and information scienc news.
Let me comment just the first point If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. ...
Isn't this why google is so popular? Do you want to be exhasuted with tons of commercial sauce? If I put ther flower, i'm interested in flower and not where to buy it
anyway, Microsoft wants to take on Google, so this is the known M$ tactics:FUD-IT
...they'd know that to get better searches you narrow down, not generalize. The general approach of search engines of telling you to "generalize" your search terms is a poor approach to addressing their limited indexing--it's created searchers who don't realize that words have multiple definitions and that only their context gives us a clue as to which definition to use.
If this Salon author were a student of mine (not that I'm a teacher) I'd have slapped an F on his research methods paper.
What foolishness.
***Foucault is watching you..***
... set up a special Google site
... so that the author can find all the tulips and apples he wants.
www.google.com/botanist
Too many commercial sites - True, and I wouldn't be surprised if google didn't allow an option soon to limit sales sites. It's feasible, and they often rise to this sort of challenge (like they did with the blog horde).
Synonym problems - This is certainly not something MSN will help with. This is also easy to get around my a little massaging of the search engine - you just think of a word that would come up in the stuff you want to see and not the other. For the retarded, perhaps Google could dynamically suggest categories after searching (kind of how they suggest misspellings).
No books for scholarly research - this is such a small use (though I am admittedly among them). Furthermore, it's not that great a problem if journals come up preferentially - if your research cites mostly books, that's a problem anyway, as it probably means your research is not current. But again, this is a problem for such a slight proportion of the population.
Bottom line is that google will fix any big problems - just think of how many things might have been on that list 3 years ago that they've already fixed. Put it this way - I have more faith in google to deliver a great search engine than I do MS any day.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
And all the shopping, paid links, popups, and crap that goes with it. Let them have their limited, corporate sponsored internet. Let them be spoonfed information, rather than blasting them with it and having them make an informed opinion or judgement. Let them have their MSN.
Just makes it easier for the aliens to take over, and until then, keeps them the hell away from me!
i think all of these "google-holes" are actually just the result of poor searching techniques on the part of the author.
also, when i need to find something on--damn i hate to say it--MSDN for work, i usually use google with the site:msdn.microsoft.com as the MS search engine is crap.
!(^((ri)|(mp))aa$)
paraphrased from one of the authors replies
"obvious if you look for steven you won't find specific people [spielberg in this case], that's the googlebias I am trying to demonstrate".
That isn't a bias. Its unspecific you nimrod.
A bias would be if you searched for "steven spielberg" and it returned links from only one website [e.g. a paid advertiser or something]. If you are just not specific enough you will get anything that matches.
The author should have pointed out searching for "steven" on search.msn.com also returns many random links such as Dell steven, msn steven, etc...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The fact that the pages are in the index, just further down is not an example that the program has blind spots, but rather if search on generic items it will bring the most likely search results based on your meagre help. If I take the author's example of 'apple' you see how weak an argument this is. If I simply use this single word then the results will be the most likely - apple computers. If I had a brain in my head I could do the following and get TOTALLY different results:
;)
"apple computers"
"apple records"
"apple trees"
If you want to do research on apples, then you better be doing more than typing 'apple' into google.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Yet their claim is weakened by the fact that if I enter "flower research," suddenly I see very, very little related to shopping, but instead to the research I'm seeking.
It all depends on the search scheme. If the claim that Google is so heavily weighted towards marketing and shopping were true, then "flower research" would have led me to buy flowers.
I would also note that "flowers" on MSN.com returns:
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer
In my mind this is not a flaw, but a feature. In fact I rely on this every day. Type in "Axis" and I go to the Apache site, not a page about WWII or math. Type in "Python" and I do no go to a page about snakes or comedy troupes.
Granted, the article does state that technophiles have skewed Google's results in my favor, but I am fully aware of this. If I did want to know about apples, for instance, I would use a search term of, say, "apple growing" (5th link down). If I want to know about the Axis powers in WWII, I would first enter "axis powers" (third link down).
It's not broken. Users must be aware of the Web's zeitgeist.
Or, if this guy wasn't a total idiot, he'd search for Apple -computer to weed out all the Apple Computer sites.
I think you're point of veiw is a little unfair. Any way MSN are bound to win.
and baby Ruby says boo hoo to you.
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Seriously, I have a lot of respect for Google (it's my IE home), but it's pretty obvious that it only can access certain types of information. I think the MSN folks were just looking to poke holes in their rival with that comment about it skewing research. If you are doing a serious research project, you go where researchers from time immemorial have gone--the library.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Think about it folks. If you walked into something like a WalMart supercenter, went to the service desk, and said "tell me where I can find some nuts", the answr would be different if you are looking for peanuts, automotive hardware, home hardware, or ??.
For example, instead of using Apple, or even Apple Newton, searching with "Apple Newton PBS" still comes up with a couple paid links back to Apple Computer but most links point to the right place, referring to the PBS series.
And in terms of only indexing PDF articles well, I have news for the folks at Slate... there aren't that many complete books out there on PDF that would be as useful to researchers as the PDFS of the articles that make up the scholarly journals themselves. So again, this perceived weakness in Google is a problem in the broad-brush arena, not in reality.
The bigger problem for most small websites and Google is building up crediblility among a wider network of links in the first place, which is where the quality of the information and it's presentation are key. Repeat after me -- there is no shortcut to success on the WWW. Build something worthless, remain in obscurity. Build something good that has value, and we -- via Google, Yahoo, or whatever search engine you like -- will eventually come.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Anyone else notice the QOTD on the bottom of this page right now? Draw your own conclusions...
'There's small choice in rotten apples. -- William Shakespeare, "The Taming of the Shrew"'
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Ofcourse Google is not the Oracle. Anybody who's seen the Matrix Reloaded knows that the Oracle was actually an evil program in cahoots with the machines.
Google is not like that. Google is more like...um...Trinity: smart, beautiful, intelligent and always there for you when you need it.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Point by point...
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time.
If I'm searching for a Canon i950 review, I will type in "Canon i950 review", not Canon i950. If you're searching for "flowers" (the article's example) you'd better have a more concrete idea of what you're looking for...
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms Search for Apple, get results from Apple computer, Fiona Apple etc? Maybe next time search for apple trees? Or "fruit and apple"?
Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning.
How is it Google's fault if "almost no one is publishing entire books online in PDF form." If they're using a closed format, why is that Google's fault? They'd likely be in violation of copyright law if they searched/cached that data.
Whatever.
That isn't an accident. In the early days on the USA, the dollar was pegged to the value of a Spanish gold coin. That Spanish coin could be broken into eight pieces to make smaller amounts - hence the term "pieces of eight". Each of the pieces was refered to as a "bit".
Eight bits made up a full coin, or a dollar. This wasn't lost of the people that coined the terminology of bit/byte.
Part of the problem is that the author appears unable to massage google to find the results he wants.
For example, when I search for a specific model of DVD player, I may search for "dvd A7049-34 review" - I was looking for a review so I put it in my search. Even better, add -shop to the end of my search. Now pages with the word shop in them will get filtered out.
Want to find info on apple farms? search for 'apple -"apple computer" -macintosh' and you'll eliminate a lot of mac webpages from the search.
Sometimes, typing a question into google will get you where you want... "how does thing X work?" More often than not you'll find the answer on the first page, because people post to newsgroups, web forums, and the like with questions and you are (usually) not the first person to ask that question.
The key here is to remember that you can tell Google what you want to find AND what you DON'T want to find (just put a minus in front of the word.)
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
A Google search for Arial seems to work pretty well today. You get links to places that sell Arial fonts, articles about choosing fonts, rants from people who don't like it, etc. It doesn't return a link to every page that uses it.
I don't think that's a flaw it just makes good sense for their example, most of the people searching for flowers are looking for emergency flowers to send to their GF or mother. If someone wants to research flowers they should probably search for Botany?
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer--and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page.
Again, I think this more a result of what people tend to be looking for when searching for Apple, I would imagine that most people querying google using the single keyword "Apple" would be looking for the company. The average user wouldn't have a reason to search google for fruit. Using a one keyword query is not good enough if you want to criticize a search engine, search for Apple and Fruit will get you everything you need to known about the non-computer apples. If you want to by fresh Apples perhaps you should search for Fruit Store?
So, when you're doing research online, Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books.
Hasn't the web been doing that for years? Is this somehow google's fault? If publishers want to have the full text of their books available on the web for free, I'm sure the folks at Google would be happy to spider them.
Ignoring all the obvious "FUD! FUD!" claims..
:o)
1) Nothing's perfect
2) Google is still be best to date
3) I'm still happy with my google search results. I can't begin to estimate how many times in work, play, and study that google has come through, again and again and again.
me 3 google
It seems like most of the authors complaints revolve around Google's search not reading his mind for exactly what he is searching for. He searches for 'apple' and it returns about bunch of articles about apples, apple growers, etc... but it's a long time before it returned something about 'Apple computers', or 'Fiona Apple'. Well maybe this jackass should have typed in 'Apple computers', or 'Fiona Apple' if he was interested in finding websites about them. What an idiot
I think MSN is wrong in listing those things as "shortfalls" of google. Many of those shortfalls are what many people think are good features of google. I like the fact that more pdfs show up in google, and I can view them directly without having to go to those websites.
When I search for something on google, what I expect to come up, comes up. If I expect shopping sites, they come up. If I expect game review sites, they come up. If I expect wacky news sites, they come up.
I'll never use MSN, mostly because of popups, they're microsoft, and also they try to sell their internet service almost as forcefully as AOL does. And they have the wrong idea of what people want from their search engines.
Google isn't perfect. It has drawbacks and it has built-in problems. But, it works. What more can you ask for from a search engine?
Also, I can never appreciate a company that uses multicolored butterflies as their logo, especially when said butterflies appear as men dressed in tights rollerskating around. I've had enough trauma in my life without being exposed to men in tights trying to sell me MSN and other Microsoft products. Ugh.
I still use Google quite a bit, but when Google gives me a mess that's hard to parse with subsearchs, I go to turbo10.com. Metasearch engine with clustering of topics much like Northern Lights had. It often gives me relevant links faster than Google does.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
I got this far in the article and couldn't take it anymore. The guy that wrote this article obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
Obvious
/Obvious
Type in what you're looking for! Want info on growing apples? Search for - *gasp* 'growing apples'!!! Want apple computers? Search for 'apple computers'. If this doesn't get you what you want, refine your search.
Google is a very good search engine. But it still doesn't always get what exactly what I want. (I have a url from a coworker that is a GREAT description of UDP multicast that doesn't seem to be in googles top 50, and the url is significantly better than any of googles top hits.)
He found it with a different search engine. (teoma.com?/ about.com?). He uses more than one engine depending on what he's doing (He does use google too)
What I'm getting at is competetion is good. It forces companies to make better products because they know if they don't others are going to try too.
Other companies are working really hard at getting a better search engine. Don't expect google to be on top forever, because athough slashdot readers love google, they'll leave it quickly if something better comes along (remember altavista/hotbot/webcrawler etc.. )
In the end everyone wins.
Typically, you want something more specific than "apple" in your search
Or you can search "+apple +fruit -mac".
I'm not sure if this falls into the "holes" category, but when entering a query for "baptist church", you get some very non-baptist institutions at the top of the search.
... but aside from theological differences, it is (at leat to me) an example of some of google's weaknesses.
One is a popular commercial site, which is also a scathing parody of hyper-fundie types. The other atop their list is the exact opposite, the type of hyper-fundy Landover pokes fun at.
Neither of which are useful for someone looking to find a church for sunday morning. Yes, I know, some of you will mod me down because I even dare discuss religion
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Of course you're going to have this. These companies spend millions of dollars making sure their pages are coming to the top of EVERY search engine, including Google. If somebody is searching for information about apples, they will search for "apples" not "apple". And if you search for "apples" you get a page entitled "Apples & More" with the description "Learn all about apples, growing and using them...".
The same can be said for the stupid comparison to flowers. Of the idiots who search for "flowers" for information about a research paper (those who know nothing about flowers), they will soon see that "information about flowers" "flower biology" and "flower development" turn up more relevent and less commercial terms.
Of course, if I searched for "design" I'd get a trillion pages about web design. But what if I was searching for "interior design". That's completely different.
It'd be sad if people were this stupid. But the reality is that people know what they're looking for and how to find it. I give this article a -1 STUPID.
Kind regards, Devon H. O'Dell
Plain and simple FUD.
Given that, as many people here have already pointed out, Microsoft is readying/improving its own search offering, I think it's pretty plain that this is just an attempt by Slate/MSN/Microsoft to smear Google, using journalism or op/ed to do so.
Google isn't biased, as the article tries to make the case, the _web_ is biased, toward the technical (and unfortunately, towards blogs.) So those, will, of course, show up first. People don't publish complete books online, but they publish papers and articles by the droves. So, of course you're going to be pointed to that stuff first.
And frankly, anyone who types in "apple" into a search engine should know that they're going to get MANY very BROAD results. You need to be specific in your search. The more specific you are, the better results you're going to get.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
he says that he (surprise) got flamed for the article on Slate a few days ago (guess slashdot was slow in picking it up). Head over to his blog to see his response to many of the comments we're making about his inability to properly form search terms. He's also got a feedback section on there so we can flame him directly if we want.
/.ed:
I've pasted it below in case his blog gets
"I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray:
The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them.
Here's a more real-world example of the bias at work, which is equally self-reflexive: search on "steven johnson emergence." The top ten results are either from blogs, Amazon product pages, or the O'Reilly Network (very big with the open source and blogging communities.) Now, Emergence was reviewed by the NY Times, the Economist, the Village Voice, the UK Guardian, and dozens of other major publications with huge readerships. But Google doesn't think those results are as relevant as blogger reviews. Now, I'm a blogger, and I love the blogging community, so I think in a way that this is not necessarily bad news. But it's hard not to see it as a kind of bias."
Since we all know MS is now targeting Google as it's next sell-out-or-die target.
Lets hope they fail in this one, but you know what? Bill never quits.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Is how Google can't win. If it doesn't pull up Apple Computing with just "apple," then it's not a good enough mind reader. If it does come up with Apple computing, then it's just a shill for marketing.
The article is transparent. Everyone posting realizes this. On the other hand, a link was made to what I believe to be an incredible site, to which I am not familiar with, yet. It is worth a check, even if you haven't RTFA.
one thing about this article that bugs me a LOT is that how it basically shows google is not an encyclopedia... which it is not designed to be!
you want to find info on apples that go in pies, use an encyclopedia. you want to find a hack for your apple, use google. google is VERY good at finding reliable HUMAN generated content. which is the VERY cool thing about the web... notice how blogs and google work so well with each other?! they basically are imitating each other!
if google is the ONLY tool you have to use the internet with, you really need to buy some books. there is a minimum requirement of intelligence here...
Heres the parent's "quote": ... before you find apple computer ..."
"look for apple and you have to troll through three pages of
Heres the full quote (word for word):
Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer
a href="+5 Insightful? More like -1 Troll! (either that or -1 Dumbass, hehe)
To be a bit fair to the article, I kind of agree to the shopping part.
The other day , I was googling for a perticular recipe and all I got was a list of restaurants,No matter how i rephrased my search, All the first 50-60 results were links to restaurants, which serve that dish, but nothing of the recipe.
Belive me if it were any other search engine , I wouldn't have even bothered , as don't expect any thing but ads from non-google search engines
Similarly I was googling for some extra information about the song stargazer from rainbow, and all i got was lyrics pages or links to CD sell.
O.T. :- IF any one can provide me with a link to more information on stargazer i would be much obliged
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Flawed or not, the article points up one issue with Google that I keep encountering: searching on the name of a particular product or company for user reviews and experiences usually throws up several pages of ecommerce links first. I don't want to know where I can buy the damn thing, I want to know whether it's any good (or more importantly, who's been burned)! (NB. I'm not convinced that simply appending the word "review" to the search string has the desired effect. Maybe I should try "[product] -scum -sucking -capitalists".)
Searching USENET sometimes finds more relevant information, ironically perhaps because of the greater anarchy there.
Ade_
/
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck
... is how some people, even smart people, don't or can't get the hang of search engines.
You know, the ones on newsgroup and mailing lists who say "anyone know of a good BLAH?". Then someone whaps them with a cluestick (or rather, google link).
There just seem to be brain types or personality types that don't get it. Here's the rules I try to impart:
But there are still some, like the author of the article, on whom any of this is lost.
Let's review this statement. The author states that no one puts up books in PDF form, and therefore, Google doesn't search these books? How is this a problem? If the book isn't online in the first place, html/pdf/whatever format, then how can Google possibly give you links to that book? Google is not a search engine *AND* a library, it is a search engine. The article seems to imply that Google is taking away from something else. The only thing I can think of is using Google for research vs. traditional methods of research, i.e., library work. If that is the author's arguement, then they are about 4-6 years behind the times, because the switch has already happened, or at least it has amongst my generation.
I haven't done research in a library since 5th grade (11 years ago).
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=apple&x=0&y=0 &FORM=SMCRT
Hmm, seems like they have the same problem? Who would have thought that?
The article is complete BS, as msn search is the same way.
"Google it" or "MSN it"? That is the question...
Honestly, think about it. A very significant portion of websites out there are trying to sell you something. (Just check out that banner at the top of this page.) So if you estimate (low, probably) that 50% of all websites are shopping sites, then its a good chance that for a search on any given topic, you'll probably end up with around 50% of the results trying to sell you what you're looking for.
This isn't Google's fault; it's the nature of the web today.
The inability to find Apple Computer using Google tells more about the collective IQ of MSN than about Google.
In some cases this be because there are just a shitload of shopping sites out there? For example, do a search for 'credit'. You get page after page of various domains from the same companies offering credit reports. Keep in mind, search engines are nothing but algorithms. Furthermore, the pagerank system that google uses takes into account how 'helpful' users found various sites, the number of times a word appears on the site, etc.
I for one don't see how any search engine can read the minds of an individual user. If I type in "apple", how is Google supposed to know what I mean? It's like going up to someone in the street and asking where the "restaurant" is. The first thing the person will ask is, "which one?". Or going to the car dealership and asking for the "car".
I think our society still has the mentality that computers should be able to do anything and everything and when they don't, something must be broken. People always complain that their computer doesn't do what they want it to do and so it must be flawed. We've all heard it..."web pages load to slowly, I can't find what I'm looking for, this program has too many menus", etc. Well, I would like my car to lift off and fly during rush hour, but it's not. Do I complain that my car is flawed? No, I just accept that there are limitations as to what certain things can do at present. Perhaps my car will one day be able to take off and fly much like someday a search engine will have a better idea of what you are looking for.
"Oh dear, she's stuck in an infinite loop and he's an idiot" -Prof. Farnsworth (Futurama)
well, a .. umm... friend of mine told me that when I sear.. when he searches for celebrities/supermodels on the internet, the first couple page are sites like altocelebs which gives you two or three links to other sites, but they themselves have almost no content on the star. It sucks to wade through two or three pages of search results linking to these kind of sites when I'm jacki...researching...when some other person that is not me is reasearching the trials and tribulations of a particular celebrity
You cannot sort by date. You cannot filter out ecommerce sites. Google is not perfect.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Actually I will use google to find places to buy obscure items. If it did not return shopping sites I would lose this valuable search feature. If none of the major online retailers have what I am looking for, I just type it into google.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
From the MSN story: Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
MSN: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, MSN's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer
Now, go to MSN and type in the word "apple". You have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer.
Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. Google is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which Google indexes as though they were traditional Web pages.
The WWW is beginning to have a subtle, but noticeable effect on research. More and more scholarly publications are putting up their issues in PDF format, which most search engines indexe as though they were traditional Web pages.
I was skimming through the thread subjects and I see words "stupid", "moron", "useless", "crap", "lame", and etc. Well, I couldn't agree more. The author begins saying that google is god (omnipotent). What he doesn't realize is that the tool is useless if you cannot properly use it. I read someone posted about a telephatic search engine..LOL. The author hopes someday he just opens google.com on his browser, stick his head on the PC screen, and out comes the search results.
Just because something doesnt work the way you want it to doesn't mean its broken or bad in any way. As a programmer at a small sofware firm the tech guys are always coming in reporting "bugs" in the software when customers complain about the way something works or if it works differently than they expect. Most of the time they are simply trying to use part of the product in a way it wasn't intended to be used or they are expecting a different result than what they are seeing. No one ever reads directions or documentation (RTFM?) so these "features" are labeled "bugs".
This article is another example of an ignorant person too lazy to look into why things work the way they do. When searching for "apple" arent you getting relevant results based on what you searched for? Google cant read your mind and KNOW EXACTLY what you want UNLESS YOU TELL IT. Gargage in, Garbage out blah blah blah.
how a company who's main consumer level homepage (msn.com) defaults the text cursor to their search bar upon loading the page comes up with such ways to slander the good name of google.
Seems like what they call a rise in popularity may in effect be those users of IE who still use the default homepage of MSN.com While with the intention of typing a URL in the address bar, since the cursor defaults to the search bar, the text ends up in the search bar. Thereby, instead of the page you were looking for, the MSN search results are in front of you. This has only happened recently (within the past month or 2, I've never seen it prior), and I'm sure is responsible for the better part of the increase of use.
Even I've fallen upon the trap while working with various customer computers who's default homepages are still MSN. Pop open IE, click the address bar before the page loads, start typing a URL. If the page finishes loading while you were typing, you'll find half of what you typed in MSN's search bar, and instincively hitting enter will only aid MSN's search conquest.
So... yes, articles published in PDF format will be indexed, but if one is doing real research, one is probably conducting a comprehensive literature search (e.g, if one is a PhD). If one is a PhD, there is a growing volume of new data will be published online, but there are still important corpos of off line literature, both old and new.
If one is doing "research" on how to buy a new car, or "research" for one's fifth grade home work project, I suspect that PDF files are probably just fine as a source and that comprehensive literature searches are not necessary (but might still be useful).
The article states "Google is implicitly pushing you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books." More relevantly and accurately (and obviously), Google is pushing you towards information that is stored online. If one uses Google for research, one should understand that it is not the only tool available. If one uses Google as the only tool, well...
I think this is a vaguely interesting point that might have a lasting impression on the way online content is indexed/stored/made searchable. However, the more relevant issue here is that individuals need to learn how to search (as many have already pointed out in comments), search tools must be understood in the context of available tools and a sense of the data to be found must be developed (it does not need to be known in advance).
I also assume that the Amazon text searching of books story might put another spin on this.
While the point that more refined searches give you better results is true, that's not what the author's talking about. He's trying to tell you that Google is an aggregation of zeitgeist and how many links things have (link interdependence, which is Google's strength, also adds its own bias), and not necessarily their relevance to the 'real' world. An understanding of how Google might skew results is useful.
Here's his site: read the July 16th article. "You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important."
I don't know, for all it's faults, I sure like the price even if I have to dig a little....
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
If you try "apple" and "flowers" on MSN, the results are also mostly commerce links. Those that aren't are MSN info sites.
Frankly, couldn't you expect someone to write something like this? I mean Google is good yet it depends on rules to calculate results. These rules are about as good as they get but there are still ways to make the results come out weird. Someone found a few examples. Big deal.
If your first search criteria did not find what you are looking for, then use slightly different criteria. I usually do a couple of searches just to make sure my first one did not miss anything interesting anyhow. Really that is best practice when using search engines.
Yes researchers use Google and I suppose the lack of books on the web may skew reseach results there but how on earth is that Googles problem? It is a web search engine! It doesn't do books (until they are published on the web at least)! This would seem to be more a flaw of researchers and less a Google flaw.
You may be right but the MSN article isn't aimed at you or other technologically literate readers. It's aimed at the average MSN user and Internet user. These users are very much like the average AOL user: they are relatively new to the Internet and may not have the skills or understanding of how to best use a search engine that you or I might have. Gene Spafford says that at any given time `the majority of Internet users have been online less than a year'.
Internet users, like any other consumer, are likely to stick with whatever service and set of sites that they are initially exposed to. This is the same in any consumer goods and services business. Why else would McDonald's, car companies, credit card companies and all the rest spend millions of dollars on getting young people (children and college students) to use their products? They want to instill brand loyalty early on.
People are comfortable and familiar with the Microsoft brand, naturally trust it, and what its media properties say. If you were a new, non-technical user like most Internet users I have little doubt that you would believe this article is fair and authoritative.
Someone should train the author of the MSN article on best search practices. Perhaps "apple computer" is better search criteria than "apple" when you ar interested in the computers. Sheeezzzz.
Is he trying to cast a bad light on google or something?
found here at the authors website:
Googleholes
I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray:
The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them.
Here's a more real-world example of the bias at work, which is equally self-reflexive: search on "steven johnson emergence." The top ten results are either from blogs, Amazon product pages, or the O'Reilly Network (very big with the open source and blogging communities.) Now, Emergence was reviewed by the NY Times, the Economist, the Village Voice, the UK Guardian, and dozens of other major publications with huge readerships. But Google doesn't think those results are as relevant as blogger reviews. Now, I'm a blogger, and I love the blogging community, so I think in a way that this is not necessarily bad news. But it's hard not to see it as a kind of bias.
A distinctive mark, characteristic, or sound indicating identity
Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
That's a feature, not a bug! The word "flowers" is rarely used in a context not relating to the florist trade. What were you expecting to find with that query, hmm? A picture of a flowering meadow, perhaps? Then you might want to try an image search for "flowering meadow". Google doesn't read your mind to figure out what you *really* want, Mr. Johnson, it just relies on what you type in. Plain and simple. And beautiful.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This article sucks. Misuse of ANY search engine, no matter the type, subject, content, or algorithm will lead to poor results. Who searches for gardening techniques using just the search term "flowers." Of course you won't find shit.
If you used, oh, maybe: flowers gardening tulips garden -buy
You would come out head and shoulders above what they claim are "google holes." Now I know Google has some weaknesses, and it's bad to really only have one search engine to turn to, but you have to RTFM and look at the search tips on ways to use a search engine. This article is weak, and filled with FUD. A real examination of the algorithm with a robust set of search terms would have been better...
It's only when we've lost everything, that we are free to do anything...
Gokubi made an excellent point - MSN is being hypocritical; they are just playing for market share and promoting their own inferior search technology. Since when did MSN bring something revolutionary to the web? One of the coolest aspects about the team at Google is they are always coming up with new stuff:
http://www.google.com/options/
And this "Google is big on shopping" issue is a false claim. If anything, Google has organized overall searching far more effectively using separate searches (for instance, for those that do want to shop for something, it's hard to beat the BETA of froogle.google.com - the only thing they need now is a way to correlate search results with reviews). Even if searches and research become skewed, it would be more the fault of the Open Directory Project (and the nature of the internet to build itself around capital - meaning MSN and others like it are more at fault for the prostitution of search results than Google or Teoma).
Oh, it was also suggested that Google was dominance in searching (you'll notice that users are not complaining about it; only other searches). This is only partially true - besides big players with lots of money and bad searches (such as MSN), you also have AskJeeves and Teoma, which are quite innovative. I have found that Teoma yields especially good results, sometimes organized better than Google.
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
I think this article is more than a little dumb. Effectively it's like saying that if you drive a car for 20 years without topping up the oil and the car fails, then it's the car's fault.
No. It's a tool, just like Google is a tool. To gain the greatest utility from a tool, you must learn how to use the tool properly. In this case it means not being utterly stupid and having at least some idea what you're going to search for.
Let's take point 2 of the article as an example. Who is going to type apple into google in the expectation of not getting 13.6 million hits? If you're going to search, what kind of apple are you looking for? Golden Delicious, Cox,whatever. This is the user's problem. If you're going to use a search engine, at least have some vague idea of what you want to look for before you start. However, in using the web as a reference one pitfall is the principle of provenance. PageRank is not enough in itself. I'm not entirely sure how the PAgeRank algorithm works ( and I'm fairly certain we're not going to get someone from google telling us either ;-) ) but it would be nice to allow for authorities to be defined, so that in the case of academic content, if an item appears in a certain source (like ACM journals, for example) then it is given higher weighting by the engine.
In addition, point 3 in the slate article is flawed. Google doesn't divert people from books. It is not the tool's fault if people do not choose to publish in that way. Also, if the New York Times choose to fence off their content, it's hardly Google's fault that it can't spider the stuff. Talk to the NY Times and ask them why they use the registration system in that way.
Let's just make this clear. Google spiders what is generally available. It is not the fault of google if content providers wish to publish in ways that may limit the scope of viewing. Google isn't perfect by any means but this article doesn't really say anything useful. And hey, don't MSN run an engine of their own too. What possible gain could they have from rubbishing Google? [Cynical? Me? How could you possibly think that...]
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.
Amazon.com Buy Linux software at the Amazon.com software store. www.amazon.com Introducing Linux Find the latest news and information on this operating system. tech.msn.com Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products. www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/migration ------- 'nough said.
MSN Search for 'flowers'
Virtually the entire first page is shopping related too. Guess Google's not the only site having problems with shopping web pages.
---
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
in one fell sweeop, they manage to take a swipe at Google (right before releseing their search engine) and just happen to do a search for Apple as their single word example.
from the "article" To a certain extent, this probably reflects the interest of people searching as well as those linking, but is the world really that much more interested in Apple Computer than in old-fashioned apples?
man, how blatent can you get. they aren't happy that links are going to their (not so much) competition and can't help but take a cheap shot at them.
same with their lame Google issues. "i put in the word "the" and didn't find the book i wanted called "The Dumbass Who Works at MSN", therefore Google sucks."
oh well.
Let's not forget that Applied Semantics, formerly Oingo, invented pretty good technology to perform meaning-based searching of the Internet. The Oingo site, now defunct, was actually pretty cool. You'd do a search on "apple" and it would offer you to refine the meaning of apple: Which kind? The fruit? The computer? Etc. I would not be surprised if Google were to integrate the technology they now own into the Google site, which would make MSN's article quite obsolete. Just wait for a year or so.
It doesn't read the minds of morons who expect to get relevant results by plugging single search words like "apple" and "flowers" into a search engine that indexes millions of pages.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It doesn't give me a popup for TravelZoo when I visit the site.
As I once learned in grad school, "Criticizing another's work is easy. Coming up with a better solution is much harder."
Johnson responds to your and other's replies by suggesting that google is biased, and that's its fundamental problem. Well, does he have any suggestions as to how someone can eliminate bias? No! If you're being asked to order search results, there is an unavoidable bias.
No search engine that ranks pages can be unbiased! Give me a break!
FWIW, here's his lame response:
... or is the author of the article the bias one? Of course if I were to research flowers in terms of gardening or botany, I'd specify that. 'gardening flowers' or 'flowers life cycle'. He expects the search engine to read his mind when you write 'apple' and mean the fruit, not the computer brand? 'apple computers' and 'apple fruit' would be what I'd type into the search engine. Google's ranking means whatever is popular on the internet gets ranked up top (by whatever else links to it). If more people on the internet link to the apple website, than aunt dora's apple farm them so be it.
Yes.
Oops... better formatting here... --- Amazon.com Buy Linux software at the Amazon.com software store. www.amazon.com Introducing Linux Find the latest news and information on this operating system. tech.msn.com Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products. www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/migration --- 'nough said.
This is typical marketing tactics from Microsoft. They start bashing competitors' products and starting touting their own long before their product makes it to the market. Haven't we seen this before?
It's very obvious that this guy is reaching here when he "Digs for Holes". It looks like instead of holes, he dug for BullS#!t, and found a lot of it.
Lets examine his points:
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time
Hrmm, lets see. I'm looking for a Home Theater Receiver today, so I type in: "Pioneer Receiver". and I get mostly links to places selling them. But lets say I want a manual for my receiver, so I type in "Pioneer Receiver manual", the results are much different. Thats what keywords are for...moron.
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms.
If I type in apple, OF COURSE i'm going to get results about apple computers. Just add the word fruit to your search, if thats what you're looking for. Ask and ye shall receive, I dunno about you..but most of those links seems to be relating to fruit.
Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning
Ok, I won't blame this one on google, I think this is due to the internet as a whole. Why would I go to the library, when I can poke around on the internet for 20 mins...and get just as much research done. Give me a break.
These all may be obvious points, but I was bored...so I decided to point them out.
home of the original cupholder
the results for a search of "flower" on msn's search engine:
R M= MSNH&v=1&q=flowers
R M= MSNH&v=1&q=apple
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FO
The search results for "apple" are interesting too:
http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FO
Sure, they have a more wide variety of results returned, but notice what the differences are...The results having nothing to do with Apple Computer point to a MSN site. The results having nothing to do with buying flowers point to a MSN site. Jeez, you don't think Microsoft would deliberately skew the results in their favor, do you?
The 3rd "hole" they list doesn't seem like a hole at all to me. You mean to say Google is lowering the barrier to entry for publishing?!?! How dare they!
Bottom line is I'll take Google's documented, open, and well understood skewing to the closed, undocumented skewing done by Microsoft.
I forgot to mention that in times like this it is important to mention the #1 rule in computing, which holds especially true for searching:
99% of the time, the air is between the keyboard and the seat.
[c0d3fu]: jwjb62@umr.edu || james@macrohub.com
You want to buy fresh apples? Why would you search on Google rather than walking to your nearest greengrocer?
Selling fruit over the internet sounds like the worst kind of dotcom daftness made flesh; I thought we got away from that rubbish ages ago.
But then the whole article just screams "Googel is teh Biast!!!" in a horribly GameFAQs way.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Google is just another tool. Like any tool, it's not responsibile for the level of skill of the user. A tool may have all the whiz-bang capability in the world, but if the weilder is lacking in skill, then none of that function matters.
The MSN article was ridiculously lame. If you want to find DVD reviews, search on "DVD +review" and you'll get pages of them, starting with the very first page. In other words, in order to effectively use Google, or any search engine, one has to know how to construct the query. Expecting a single word search to discriminate down to the level of detail that any given person wants is hopelessly naive. Besides, Google has never made any prestence about having a commercial slant.
MSN's apparent expectation that google ought to accomodate those with enough skill to get on-line, but not much more than that, is just more of their corporate bias leaking through.
And as long as the pots calling the kettle black here...
Flowers: MSN Results Google Results
Apple: MSN Results Google Results
MSN only has a higher percentage of results about different things because by default they return 15 results instead of Googles 10.
And the third issue of book learning has nothing to do with PDF.
The point is you have to put SOMETHING on the web for google to find it. It doesn't yet go to the library and read books for you. That's probably still in beta.
SUCKS Darn - I was looking for MSN.
Apparently basic computer literacy isn't a requirement for doing technical reporting on MSN. The examples given are just silly.
They complain that a search for "flowers" mostly returns commercial sites, not information on gardening tips. What is Google supposed to do, read your mind to determine your real intention? "Flowers" might mean you want to buy some flowers, look at pictures of flowers, get information growing your own flowers, buy some flower seeds, or be looking for a company or person with the "Flowers" name. Useless. However, if you try the crazy idea of asking for what you want, amazingly you're much more likely to get the results you want. Interested in gardening tips? Don't search for "flowers", instead search for "gardening tips". Oooh, look, lots of useful links. Interesting in flower gardening tips specifically? Unsurprisingly, "flower gardening tips" returns a slightly different set of relevant links.
Searching for a product's model number doesn't return reviews? Again, if you want a review, maybe you should ask for a review. Sure enough, "apex ad1200" primarily returns places to buy the DVD player, but just adding review to the search term returns useful results. (Yes, Dealtime does jump to the top of the list, but that page does have several reviews on it.)
Oh no, search for "apple" doesn't return any information on artist Fiona Apple for many pages. Maybe you should actually search for "fiona apple"? Don't remember her first name? Try "apple female artist" or apple female musician" which return some good pointers (notably to her first name, which will return even better results.
"apple" doesn't get you information on the fruit? Well, step one is search refinement. Prior to Google people spent lots of time refining searches. Just because Google often does what you want doesn't mean you'll never need to refine your search. So, let's be a bit more specific. Let's try "apple fruit" Viola, hits on the fruit. Want to learn about growing apples? How about "growing apples" Wow, more good hits.
Google doesn't index sites with non-public archives (like the New York Times ? Well, duh. They also don't sneak into your house and index your tax returns. By requiring registration to access their archives, the New York Times has effectively declined to be indexed. Expecting Google to circumvent that decision is stupid.
On the subject of Google not magically indexing everything, we get to the extremely silly complaint that doing research using Google tends to steer people only to online sources, not books. Again, duh. Similarly, if you use your local library's card catalog (or more typically, online catalog), it will only return books and magazines, not web pages. The points to two things. First, if you're doing Real Research, limiting yourself to a single source (be it online or in a library) is just dumb. Second, the internet is rising in importance, and perhaps publishing books online is a good idea.
Google is doing so well that lots of people are interested in taking potshots at it. I'm all in favor of people challenging the status quo, but try to have some real complaints.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Tin Foil Hat Theory:
Microsoft modified it's search engine before the article went live to make sure it could make these silly allegations seem real.
Granted, the other side of me suggests if you had searched "apple" in msn you would have found only entries on fruit.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
You've changed the criteria in the middle of the discussion, but that doesn't matter. Fancy that, first second and third links I think a lot of people might have seen that one coming.
if you want to do a search for flowers and all you get is
just florists change search from flowers to "flowers -florists"
all this article does is just tells everybody how the writer doesn't
even know how to use google.
Either this writer is an idiot or he thinks his readers are. (It is MSN after all)
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
Well, since 90 percent of websites in the world are selling something, I'd say that's right on.
Googlehole No. 2: Skewed Synonyms. Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer
Is it that hard to include quotes and another search term. When this guy wants to research gold gloves of Ozzie Smith, does he search for "smith"? Idiot.
Googlehole No. 3: Book Learning. This is of course no surprise because I would think most authors don't publish their books online for free. PDF articles on the other hand are all over the place.
that wouldn't make sense at all... /boggle
of course google's not perfect. nothing is.
but until msn releases something that puts out higher quality hits - i think it's safe to label their article as marketroid whining.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
i forget -- is this "uncertainty" or "doubt"?
Taking the "apple" example for, er... example:
Yes, googling "apple" brings up (unsurprisingly) www.apple.com as first hit.
However, googling "apple fruit" brings up the Virginia Apple page on controlling apple tree pests as first hit and "apples" brings up the Univerisity of Illinois Extension Service Apple page as first hit. Wow ... rocket science.
I doubt this is an example of bias or intentional spin. Remember Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity" or, more generally, Sturgeon's Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crap".
Seems some words got lost...
This
Some people (the article author?) also seem
should be
Some people (the article author?) also seem to miss
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
For "Flowers", and I'll be damned if thier first 14 hits are for buying or delivering flowers, and of course #15 is a course on flowers (not a free course).... Seems to me if M$ would have wanted to give their report any validity, they would have changed their searchs to bring up something other than a full page of flower sales.... or any sales for that matter.. i'm off to find a good research article on "Widgets" I think I'll try hotbot...
Mine means my own, but how can this be if I owe for it?
Google doesn't have any problems with its results. If Apple computer shows up more than real apples, it's because nobody gives a crap about real apples, nowadays. If you want to find information on tulips but don't want florists, add -florist to your search query, and so forth.
/bla.php?date=20030721.
What google is really bad at, however, is following links with ? in them -- querystrings. Google USED to be really good at that, but recently it has simply started ignoring new pages of the type
People who publish information in that format have had to do some hacking to remove the querystrings. According to this article, google started indexing pages with querystrings sometime in 2001.
However, I started publishing a bunch of pages with querystrings in Aug 2002 (in an otherwise well-indexed site) and none of them were indexed until I removed the querystrings in March 2003. The day after I did that, google was all over the site, hitting pages like mad.
If after 5 years of service, which is invaluable in my opinion, you can only find 3 "google holes" then I'd say thats pretty damned good.
A few things I kept in mind while reading this article:
1) Its from msn.com which provides no service as far as I can tell. The only time I've ever visted that site is when I first start up Internet Explorer on a fresh windows install. Then I promptly change my start page to www.google.com.
2) IIRC Microsoft is looking at creating a new search engine? Maybe someone else can speak to this but I vaguely remember reading about it and how they wanted to compete with google. If thats accurate...the FUD has already started.
3) My own expieriences with Google. There is a reason I use it daily and that is because it is the best search engine. Is it perfect? No but it is the best. It is a tool and if you learn the tool you can find the results you are looking for by adjusting your input.
I'll be back I'm going to google on this microsoft search engine thing...
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
The MSDN search engine is slow and *awful*. Nobody I know that does Windows software development uses it...they use Google with "site:".
Just because someone codes for Windows doesn't mean that they think that all of MS's products are good, and the MSDN search engine is a stinking pile of crap.
May we never see th
Plus everyone seemed to miss this bit of the article:
You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure. But the existence of Googleholes suggests an important caveat to the Google-as-oracle rhetoric: Google may be the closest thing going to a vision of the "group mind," but that mind is shaped by the interests and habits of the people who create hypertext links. A group mind decides that Apple Computer is more relevant than the apples that you eat, but that group doesn't speak for everybody.
Which is a fair enough point. Sometimes what I'm looking for is not what Google thinks I'm looking for and I have to tailor my searches somewhat.
But if MS included an option to ignore certain sites (such as shopping, blogs etc.etc) then I'd take a look.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
To be totally honest, I've never found any search engine that gave me good results. Including Google.
I've used WebCrawler, Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, and Google regularly throughout the past ~8 years, and I've tried adding specific keywords, varying many different keywords in different searches, using plain English sentences with and without qotes, etc... and generally I have to go to the 3rd or 4th page of results before I find anything useful, and I have NEVER clicked "I'm Feeling Lucky" EVER.
I guess I don't search for the same things everyone else searches for.
"I've been called worse things by better people." -Pierre Elliott Trudeau after being called an asshole by Richard Nixon
It would have been nice if they contrasted Google's malfunctions with MSN's...
MSN Query: Linux
1. Amazon.com
Buy Linux software at the Amazon.com software store.
www.amazon.com
2. Introducing Linux
Find the latest news and information on this operating system.
tech.msn.com
3. Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP
Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products.
www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/migration
And this isn't half as bad as I remember it used to be.
I had a phone interview with Google several months ago for a product developer. I was told the job specification was to come up with new ideas to make Google better. So during the phone interview they asked me what I would change about Google. My answer? I gave them the example that if you want to find information on where apples are grown and you search for 'apple', all you find are Apple links.
No joke. Who stole my example?!
Naturally I agree with this article. What was Google's response to my suggestion? They told me it was irrelevant because there are more links to Apple Computers.
I didn't get the job.
When you say "there", how does a speech recognition algorithm choose between outputting "their", "there", or "they're"?
Today's speech recognition algorithms use sentence context to solve the problem. This is similar to Google's search. When you search "flowers", how does the search algorithm know when to output "flowers.com", "free gardening tips", or "50% off when you spend $100 or more on a flower arrangement".
The article doesn't say Google's search algorithm isn't capable of refining search results. It's saying that Google's method is flawed. A perfect search algorithm should return exactly what a person wants, no matter what they type in the search field.
See... these are the kinds of ideas that we need! Implimentation might be a problem, but the idea is supurb.
Only problem is that with as much porn as I look at, the whole result system would be sk(r)ewed.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
Oh, nevermind.
Argument 1: "All Shopping, All the Time"
When I search for DVD, the bulk of pages on the web are selling a dvd, so why should I expected a majority of those dropped out in place of "John Doe's personal page of DVD worship?" If I want a review, I search on: dvd review, or dvd consumer reviews, etc.
This falls under 'what we expect'...
Argument 2: "Skewed Synonyms"
Their apple example was laughable. If I want to search for "Washington State Apple Growers Association" I don't search for "apple" and then "sift through 50 results". This is nearly the exact same complaint as the above, just reworded.
The general thought they are trying to pass off, "If you search for a general term you don't get exactly what you were looking for" is missleading. You get exactly what you were looking for, general stuff.
Only children and very much less experienced people search for terms like "games", or "apple". Anyone who has used the yellow pages will instinctively know how to get around using the google search tool.
Argument 3: "Book Learning"
Here the article writter(s) argue that google is changing the way research is done, well, so did libraries! They brought all the information into one place. Is this bad? Is this the product of Google's page rank system?!?
They even excuse google for this "Google Hole" by making the discliamer: "You can't really hold Google responsible for these blind spots. Each of them is just a reflection of the way the Web has been organized by the millions who have contributed to its structure."
So the argument that more people search the web, and less go to libraries to read book, thus forcing people to publish books on the web in pdf format really isn't an argumentable point, it's a statment. And???
All in all, I would say this article has about the general quality of an editorial written by highschool newspaper (mine was awful back in the day, appologies to those who have had better experiences). I'm not going to bite on the "they publish this to promote their own new search engine. It's not that level of FUD.
Read it yourself. You will find yourself laughing... it least it is good for that.
I ship fruit (oranges for Florida) to friends at Christmas. My greengrocer will NOT ship produce, but there are a number of websites from various growers, that do. The one I use, I found via google, if I wanted to ship apples to someone, I would start with a google search (apples + shipping)
After a few paragraphs of the article, I started to remember that the tool is only as good as the user. Complaining that if you type in "flower" you get mostly online florists and little flower information? That's because, simply, there are MORE ONLINE FLORISTS than anything else so that's what you'll find. If you want to do "research on flowers" like the article says, for goodness' sake be more specific in your search! Use more terms! Used an advanced search! Use the google categories, which sort the best-ranked sites under categories! The search engine will search the web, but statistically a generic search will return different kinds of sites (ecommerce, etc.) based on the proportion of those sites in the search engine's database. Google's page rank alleviates that problem by ranking sites, if they are e-commerce or otherwise, that are better than the others. If most people search for and click to on-line flower vendors after searching for "flowers", then pagerank is doing its job by increasing the ranking of those sites and serving the majority of the users!
Basically, minorities get the shaft when searching, so you have to be more creative and/or use an advanced search. Google can't satisfy everyone; it satisfies the majority though. Bottom line: It's still better than anything else for 99% of people's searches.
Search for apples and you get the fruity kind of apples as result.
Logically actually.
"Apple" is the company name.
And it's Fiona Apple's last name.
But who on earth wants to know anything about a single apple?
Search for apples and you get apples.
Search for apple and you get apple.
Fact is Apple the company is more popular then singular apple, but
And his bias:
I wonder what happens whenI search for windows...
Is the world really so messed up we are more interested in a shitty OS then in real life windows?
Although maybe I should search for window...
Hello, Kettle, yeah, this is Pot...you're black!
What a bunch of nonsense that article is. It only covers brain dead web surfers who are too stupid to qualify their searches properly. GIGO, people! I blame Jeeves which made everyone thing that the search box had to be a single statement rather than a set of individual keywords.
proper searches:
Googlehole #1:
flowers -florists
flowers gardening
flowers tulips
review
Googlehole #2:
apple trees
apples
Googlehole #3:
does anyone really want to download a whole book to read one paragraph? With indexing, there is no difference between a PDF of a book and a PDF of book chapters or an article.
Not affiliated with Google, but I hate to see people influenced by stupidity.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Yeah, it was written by Microsoft, which is out to get Google. And poorly formed search queries yield poor search results. Ah, I remember AltaVista, when you had to spend 10 minutes carefully crafting just the right query to make sure your results were decent. Along comes Google. Pop in 1 or 2 words, and boom, perfect results! Often, the most relevant search result sat at #1. How novel.
Fast forward 4 years. Google has been figured out. Link farms sprout, bloggers have risen and shopping sites have the incentive to imrpove their search rank. All of a sudden, that simple 1 or 2 work query results is a whole bunch a junk. So, we carefully craft our search query after we figure out the junk which is cluttering it. Usually on my 3rd try, the result I really want hits the top ten.
Google is great, but not as good as it was before it landed on everybody's radar screen. Heisenberg rules, and this sort of Deja' Vu' will happen again and again as websites figure out the most efficient way to manipulate the results in their favor. Google had turned the tide in our favor for a few years, but they are losing now. If they don't fight back in the next year or two, they'll go the way of AltaVista.
It annoys me that we even linked an MSN article - they are so blatantly geared towards making sure all the ignorant people in the world believe their opinions.
For example they complained in the article about when you search for "flowers" it brings up flower stores, when you search for "apple" it brings up aple computer links.
Who cares - when you look for something you don't use 1 word links - EVERY SEARCH ENGINE WILL TELL YOU TO BE MORE SPECIFIC THAN THAT - it's common sense, that if I want to look up info about a flower I would do a search for "Daisy Lion Information" (or soemthing similar) I would not type in just "Daisy" same goes for if I wanted information on a hardware item. I would type in "Part # review" not just the "part #"
I hate how MSN articles play on the fact that most people will ASSUME that this "Google" search engine is terrible because they can't do accurate searches on non-specific-and-vague request - OOOH shame on Google for not bringing up information about "Hell and Satan" when I type in "Diablo"
I hate you MSN
Ave Molech Setting
>> These are systemic problems
A systemic problem you are google...
It is the anamoly
Should we proceed?
Yes, he is still only human
* Google kicks ass
And the 2nd result is for MSN search. Hmmm... Pot, meet kettle.
in the old days, to conduct a slightly complex search you had to be a divine booleanist - with google, you don't.
this is mainly in reference towards this whole shopping bias. i agree that if you search for, say, "Sony Widescreen" you get a crap-load of pages about where you can buy it. add the word "review" in your search term, and all of a sudden you get a lot more relevance.
perhaps google should suggest additional keywords for the refinement of your search vis "You appear to be interested in Sony telelvisions, click here to search for product reviews." where the "here" just adds &review in the same search term. not rocket science.
secondly, i'm quite astounded with their "apple" statement. i put apple in, hit i'm feeling lucky and i'm on the apple.com website - am i missing something?
First thing that MS does to competitors in internet communication software is to discredit (drive investers away lower company value), then offer to buy, if that fails, then obfuscate the XML with more .NET and other important bullshit changes to internet language tools in its OS base. The next step is to again make things difficult by cloning the competitions features with the functions in their own software that cannot interface with the competitors ware. Then as the user base dries up offer again to buy out the software. This is the nature of the .NET strategy no wonder why whole Countries are starting to get more than a little pissed with M$.
Competition is one thing economic despotism is another! They have successfully done this to WordPerfect, Netscape, AOL. No suprise Google is next, Adobe will take more time but you can bet they too are on Gates hit list.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
This writer is complaining that searching for the make & model of a dvd player turns up pages of online store results and no reviews. TRY SEARCHING FOR "make model reviews"!!!
The writer also complains that searching for "apple" doesn't find things related to Apple Computers right away, but that they're down the list with Fiona Apple etc. Well, for chrissake, SEARCH FOR "Apple Computer" if that's what you want!
I don't think these are 'googleholes' so much as users who don't realize that searching for more words returns fewer results (more focussed). It's inversely proportional, people!!!
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
How about searching on msn.com to compare.
Unfortunately I've lost the ranking now but for the last few months I had been in the msn top10 of familysex sites.
Anyone searching for familysex there would certainly be thoroughly dissapointed with what they find.
Top 3 are directly about apples and do not involve buying them.
The thing that make google powerful is it's 'negative' keyword capabilities.
The world is comging to an end:
http://tech.msn.com/software/OS/
First 15 results from search.msn.com, only 3 are not about apple computers...
s /AppleSto re?family=iMacG4&
l
Tech Depot
Shop for software and accessories for Apple computers.
techdepot.officedepot.com
Apple Recipes
Find old and new favorite apple recipes.
houseandhome.msn.com
Interact with Mactopia Newsgroups
Meet and share with other users of Microsoft products for the Mac.
microsoft.com/mac/support/newsgroups.asp
SPONSORED SITES - ABOUT
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WEB DIRECTORY SITES - ABOUT
Mac OS - Apple Computer
Find updates and news regarding the latest version of the operating system. Access support information, user groups, software and the store.
www.apple.com/macos
Dealmac
Comparison-shop for the best deals on Macintosh hardware and accessories at this page, which compiles the lowest prices offered by retailers.
www.dealmac.com
AppleCare Support
Mecca for Mac, Apple and Newton users. Includes discussion forums featuring input from Apple engineers.
www.info.apple.com
Apple - iMac
Order the new iMac with a G4 processor and CD or DVD burning capabilities. Check for Apple rebates and other special offers.
store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObject
Macintosh Products Guide
Peruse a catalog of hardware and software products, and make a purchase. In English, Italian, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Swedish.
www.macsoftware.apple.com
Apple - Hardware
Presents the entire line of Apple hardware, including desktops, laptops, iPods, and cameras. Takes purchase orders.
www.apple.com/hardware
Apple Journal
Publication for apple lovers features apple variety notes, taste test results, grower information, an orchard locator and cooking tips.
www.applejournal.com
Apple
Details product information about genuine Mac desktops and laptops from the authentic source. Find system, ordering, and warranty details.
www.apple.com
Apple Store
Shop for Apple PowerBook g4, iMac, and iBook computers. Find iPod portable music players, Mac software, peripherals, networking gear, plus memory upgrades.
store.apple.com
Macintosh OS.com
Visit the museum to view product specifications and trivia about old and new Macintoshes, check the classifieds, or join the discussion forum.
www.macintoshos.com
Apples and More
Learn about apple orchards, apple nutrition, varieties, and selection. Also includes recipes and fun activities for children.
www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/apples/index.htm
Macintosh News Network
Browse coverage of Mac news, including new applications, software updates and advice on bugs and troubleshooting.
www.macnn.com
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
His commends on his own article:
"The point I'm trying to make is that all other things being equal, Google will skew results towards online stores and pages linked to by the blogging community. (And away from books towards articles, though that's a slightly different point.) You can make things less than equal by doing more refined searches, but that doesn't mean the skew isn't important. This reminds me in a way of the old debate about Microsoft controlling the desktop -- the Microsoft folks would always say, "people can install their own application icons on the desktop so what's the big deal if our icons come as part of the default setup?" The point is that default biases in widely used tools have real effects, even if there are relatively easy ways around them. "
It was bad that this came from msn.com since it is a conflicting interest. But this DOESN'T seem like MSN's attempt to start knocking down goggle's god-like reputation. It seems like a simple article about the downfalls of google (and the current web).
In essence he says that since billions have been spent on commercial web sites that google reports this infrastructure the way google does with all information. But as the web becomes more commercial than so does the web searches. The more commercial means the less informative.
The article makes sense and to anyone who thinks about it for a minute knows this about the search engine. It basically tells people to be very descriptive in their searches since commercial products will have the spotlight on all the one word searches. (apple, speaker, car, house, beer, travel, jar, picture, etc)
Altavista's biggest advantage at the time was the ability to do "advanced" searches (why are boolean operators considered advanced, anyway?) AND the fact that the web was so new that the sleazeball/MLM/marketing/fraud crowd hadn't yet figured out how to rig their pages to skew the search results. So not only could you do a pretty precise search, the corpus of
I'm pretty sure Google makes an ongoing attempt to counteract the attempts to skew their search results without adversely harming the results themselves. However, I'm not sure that the quality of results is what it was back in the good ol' altavista.digital.com days.
I kind of wish they'd implement some optional filters that would peform potentially 'negative' filtering on results to eliminate commercial or otherwise questionable results.
The article does do a good job at pointing out possible improvements. For example the article mentions how biased the search can get towards particular trends on the web.
To workaround this, the folks who have worked in the field of Information Retrieval offer query refinement. An example of this can be seen at work with Teoma. Teoma offers to automatically refine your search query into narrower concepts it thinks are relevant to the original search. Type in "Jaguar" and it will return results as well as a box that suggests you could search for the car or the animal by modifying the query further.
Overall, I feel the article walks a thin line by associating Google with the flaws. On the other hand for the folks at Google, it has been 5 years now. Maybe the improvements are not coming along as I expected. In any case, their index rules. As far as the web is concerned, in my opinion they are the Oracle...
Santosh Dawara
They are mistaken, or making assumptions, when they make many of their complaints.
.. "no, I mean the fruit". This technique works just as well in google.. and it's what people have been using to disambiguate communication in real life for millienia :)
-Laxitive
It's quite easy to tailor keywords searches in google.
Their first complaint is that many searches yield shopping sites as results instead of informational sites. Not surprising, since a lot of traffic on the internet is commercial. But it is easy enough to fix.
For example, in their article, they quote:
Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists.
True. However, search for "growing flowers" or "flowers gardening" or "flowers gardening tips", and you are immediately led to pages which focus on what you are looking for.
Also:
The same goes for searching for specific products: Type in the make and model of a new DVD player, and you'll get dozens of online electronic stores in the top results, all of them eager to sell you the item. But you have to burrow through the results to find an impartial product review that doesn't appear in an online catalog.
If you are searching for reviews of products, just add "review" to the search. For example, searching for "dvd reviews" leads to many informative links.. the top one being "dvdreview.com".
The second complaint they have is about searches operating on synonyms of what you are searching for rather than what you actually want. Their example:
Search for "apple" on Google, and you have to troll through a couple pages of results before you get anything not directly related to Apple Computer?and it's a page promoting a public TV show called Newton's Apple. After that it's all Mac-related links until Fiona Apple's home page. You have to sift through 50 results before you reach a link that deals with apples that grow on trees: the home page for the Washington State Apple Growers Association.
This too, is easy enough to get around just by being more specific. Not looking for sites about apple computer, but rather sites about the apple fruit? Just search for "apple fruit".
Their last few points give some insight into what they are actually trying to claim with the article. They are not saying that google is "bad", but rather that the idea of google being an objective impartial window into the web is flawed, because while google itself might be impartial, its algorithms are skewed by the biases inherent inherent populace, which affed the hyperlink patterns on the web that google uses for its search heuristics. This is a valid point, but it is not a very useful one, because there is really nothing else that does better for general searches. Google is far and ahead of any of the other general search engines. Not to say that google is the best for searching for anything - for many resources, a more specific, niche search engine might do what you want. If you're searching for research publications in biology, PubMed might be a better idea than doing a general search on Google. For general searches, however, Google is king. The main thing is, google has the pulse of the internet. It has a general sense of what content on the internet is geared towards, and it reflects that in its searches. Searching for "eclipse" leads to the JIBM Eclipse page, not a page on solar eclipses. Searching for "apple" leads to apple-computer related pages, not to apple-fruit related pages. This problem is inherent in human relations too. If you approach an elderly woman and tell her "I bought an apple today", she would probably interpret it differently than, say, a friend in your fellow CS program at university. The woman might respond with "what? Granny smith?", while the CS student might respond with "A laptop or a desktop?". In human converstaions we get over these ambiguities by adding context. If you were actually talking about buying a fruit when I was talking to the CS student, I might qualify my statement with
would this have anything to do with a lot of "popular" (read:pages with lots of links and hits) are shopping oriented sites? I mean next to pron, isn't shopping the next biggest thing on the internet? Where as I like to assume that teh average /.er is like me and likes to read howtos, webblogs, strongbad, sinfest, pennyarcade, and the multitude of other interesting littel tid bits of info and desertations, etc... but for the avarage joe chained to his/her cube pulling the oar with everyone else usually hits up the shopping stuff at work, and the pron at home (at least his/her employer's hope) this might explain any serach engine's skew towards shopping sites, but hey this is my opinion i could be wrong
On a side note, look up the name steven and the 2nd result is the guy's homepage. Google is mysterious, all bow your heads :)
Didn't MSN announce recently they want to compete with google? It seems to me they are looking pretty hard for holes in google.
If you want information on tulips, and you type "flowers" in your search engine, then you clearly don't know how to use a search engine (not just google, but ANY search engine!) Go to google and type in "tulip information" (with or without the quotes) and you'll probably find what you want in the first three hits.
Similarly, if you want information on Apple Computer Inc, you'll probably want to enter "apple computer" and not just "apple" since there's a lot of things in this world that have something to do with apples but nothing to do with that company.
"If you want to be on google, you gotta be on the web" Well NO SHIT!!!!!!! Theres a shocking revelation. I sure as fuck don't go to google to look for things like my local TV schedule, unless of course I think that information might be somewhere on THE WEB.
I also don't follow the point about pdf files. Google spiders and indexes pdf files, so they show up in your search results. Is there a search engine out there that doesn't "implicitly push you toward information stored in articles and away from information stored in books?" Again the point being here we're looking on the WEB and not in the LIBRARY. I don't fire up google to tell me where to find a book at the library, I go to the library for that.
I love google, over 90% of the time I can find what I'm looking for with them (I remember searching being a crapshoot before google came along, when I was stuck using shit like altavista and lycos, they are fortunately just an unpleasant memory now) and their innovations mostly work for me. I like news.google.com and groups.google.com. I'd sure as fuck trust them more than and msn run search engine/portal, although to be fair I'll give them their chance when they start offering a service that is worth my time to use.
The reason why shopping sites show up in the top results of google is purely because they have the most links back. PageRank technology is based on the number of returning links to a site. So if a shopping site has 10,000 affiliate websites of course its going to show up in the top.
Users just need to learn to be more specific on their searches. Instead of searching for "flowers" a user should search for "growing flowers" or "planting flowers" something to help limit the results
Ok first of all, I think I have to discount almost the entire article based on one simple oversight. It was the example of trying to find information on Apples, no the plastic-silicon-metal apples, the organic-delicious apples. The author searched for "Apple." In common parlance, especially on the web, it seems obvious to anyone "in the know" that "Apple" would produce computer-related results. Searching for "Apples", a simple addition of the character "s" changes everything. Now you can have your apple and eat it too, with google.
Looking over the entire article, I imagine that all the shortcomings of google that the author points out, and I admit they are shortcomings, can be solved by more intelligence on the part of the user. Maybe that should have been the articles premise: the user isn't smart enough to find what he's looking for on the web, so microsoft needs to intervene. It would have been better than "google is fundamentally flawed". A better tract would have been to start out philisophically instead of practically: What is an ideal structure for a search engine?
I think the answer that the article was implying, though not stating, was that a nested structure was necessary. So if you searched for flowers, the search engine would know into which category all the google-type links fell into. So you would have stores selling flowers (category 1), information on what a flower is (category 2), and so on. This is nested because the actually "flat" data that google spills out is then organized into a hierarchy of different categories.
In another vein, and kind of antithetical to a search engine, is basic beforehand knowledge of where to find something, precluding a search engine. This kind of information knowledge is typified by librarians, who study for years on how to research and find specific types of information.
It is this Academic versus Economic dichotomy that is at the heart of the article. It might be apples and oranges, but only if you don't know what you're doing, and presume that a search engine like google is something it isn't, i.e. a librarian. If you search the web for something you better damn well have some idea of what the web contains in that respect or your searching will most likely be out of focus.
Go to Google UK and enter keywords "weapons of mass destruction" and hit "I'm feeling lucky"
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
more likely you've been owned my friend
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
While their examples are true, the concepts in a search engine don't make much sense.
I'm not going to lookup info about tulips by typing in "flowers." I might try something more specfic like "tulip varieties info."
It's a manner of using the internet. Most people on Slashdot wouldn't be too surprised to see that Apple Computer is what shows up when you search for "apple." Novice computer users might be. Then again, there might very well be more popular links to Apple's website and products on the web than there are to sites about...well...fruit. So if you want apples, try "apple fruit" in your search.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
Why not reduce the number of commercial search results to attract customers to the search page... until advertisers pay to inject THEIR commercial "search results" with little competition?
You do not want a company with a significant monopoly in operating systems giving out results to internet search queries, can anyone think of why this is a bad idea?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
The article states Google's problems very badly. It's not thought through sufficiently well and looks like something the author knocked out in a few minutes.
He does have a (small) point though - page rank is not necessarily a good indicator of 'quality' or relevance, it's just generally pretty well correlated with it.
Steven Johnson has some responses to a bit of the slashdot criticism of his article. They can be found here.
I am using Opera at work, and that link causes it to crash. I know it's that link, because when Opera restarts where it left off, it crashes as soon as it fetches that page.
Of course, I am using Opera 7.10 on Win32.
That probably will get a few pokes (#1 being the Win32, #2 for using V7.10 instead of V7.11..), but I am dead serious.
I wish Opera would say why it's crashing..
- The Original Anonymous Coward
...about these Googleholes:
"I am getting flamed to high heaven in Slate's Fray for a piece of mine they just posted talking about some of the built-in limitations of the Google PageRank system. The general critique seems to be that I don't understand how to refine a search, which I guess I should have made clear in the piece itself. (I do, for the record. I also think Google is absolutely brilliant.) But as you can see if you follow the link, it's not a piece about how to use Google more effectively; it's a piece about ways that Google's system implicitly pushes us in certain directions, which makes it less like an authoritative reference source, and more like an op-ed page. (Nothing wrong with that, just something we should keep in mind.) Normally I quote from the articles themselves in this blog, but today I think I'll quote from a followup comment that I posted in the Fray..."
http://stevenberlinjohnson.com
You too can participate in the roast by finding his e-mail address on Google.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I liked the article
It made a very good point that if you think google is an oracle then your expectations are to high.
Google simply ranks whats actually on the web
If you are searching for "flowers" and expecting gardening tips you are in the minority, if you weren't then results would be different.
ps-shame on all the MSN-flameing, the article didn't mention MSN and I'm embarrassed that so many slashdotters condemned the article 'cause the intro mentioned MSN!
the article was about people treating google like an oracle, proved why it wasn't, but got pretty obtuse after that
Actually, I think that Google is less useful than it has been in days gone by, though the reason has nothing to do with this article. In the past, I could always count on relevant info w/ rediculously sparse search terms, but I find that today even clever searching sometimes leaves me frustrated.
Here's my theory: Before Google, I (like many people) had a laboriously compiled, extensive bookmark list which I kept online so it'd be accessible everywhere. Search engines were so bad that every useful site was a hard won victory and I made sure that I kept any remotely useful site on that list.
When Google arrived, that suddenly became pointless. A quick search always got me the info I wanted, and my bookmark list atrophied. I hypothesize that this happened to the majority of online personal bookmark pages over the past few years and Surprise! Google suddenly no longer has a high quality data source for its "PageRank" algorithm.
Does this mean that good search engines are forever doomed to destroy themselves? Whatever data mining they do to mine pages reduces the value of the data source... leading to reduced information quality.
The parent of my post is right. It would be great to see a rating for the page you select. I have often thought about what effect on google each page I visit has on the overall ranking of the search I made (mostly how infantisimal it would be registered as), and how innacurate it could be. If only there was a button you could press that would give more weight to a certain good link off the google search page. I wonder what the problems with this would be (abuse and bots come to mind).
I went to battle MC Escher, but drew a blank
Part of the problem with the article is that it forgets that people need to learn how to use a search engine.
Looking up just "apple" is a bad idea no matter what you use. MSN isn't much better, but it does one thing right: it realizes there are different types of apples and offers links at the top to computers, fruits, quicktime and a vacation company.
It's always a good idea to be more specific about what you want: "apple orchard", "apple computers", "apple movies", etc.
ever tried searching for Linux on MSN? -- oddly enough the first link you get it to amazon.com andmentions "buying linux" -- the second seems to be alright, and the third is funny altogether: 3. Alternatives to Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP Learn about the Microsoft alternatives and how to move to them from open source products. www.microsoft.com/serviceproviders/migration
...
I am a university professor and often do google searches to find interesting real worl uses of thermodynamics for my class. Over time, I have noticed that google seems to be getting more cluttered, finding more junk. When I first used it, google seemed almost magical in its ability to sort through the chaff. Now, I am not convinced it is much better than the webcrawler and altavistas of old. Is it just me, or is anyone else seen this?
Iowa
"He who laughs last, didn't get the joke."-Cap
If these trivial non-issues are the best the MSN team can come up with in terms of an attack on google's search algorithms, I think that the google team really deserves a pact on the back, and confirms that they may have nothing to fear about from MSN's foray into their turf.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
I don't know what model you're after, but the naïve brute-force attempt works pretty good IMHO. No shops in sight, except for nicely layed-out sponsored links: Digital Camera Reviews
It seems Google is favouring many consumer sites when you include the word "reviews". I have used it many times, and rarely find webshops, and have my tricks when I do (unless I want to browse them of course). If you want to avoid webshops for specific searches, you might try including "-prices", "-cart", etc, to weed out results. "+prices" usually works when you want to find prices, but then it's usually best to let a site tell you what's cheapest.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
After having read both the article, and the majority of high-ranking comments here, I must say article is more objective than the majority of comments. Google is not perfect and the article points out some shortcomings. Of course, they are a logical result given how google works, but it can still be argued that some results are less than optimal. Of course, by changing the query you can get better results, but it is also possible that a different page rank algorithm can give better results.
Why not instead discuss algorithms that would give apple, the fruit, the same relevance in search results as it has in most people's lives? If a search engine appeared that added that knowledge to its result ranking, Google would not be on top any longer.
Is it only me, or the article page doesn't seem to render propely in Mozilla?
Time for a Mozilla Bork edition?
They shall pay for their foul words. Burn the Heretics!!!!
Let's look at a more subtle aspect through:
Is this verification that Google is vulnerable to astroturfing? If you assume that half of all web pages with the term "apple" are talking about the computer company and the other half are referring to the fruit, then it seems like a search for the term "apple" should bring up about equal numbers of computer & fruit hits. The fact that most top hits are about the company instead of the fruit probably suggests that at least some of the "ballot stuffing" tricks that companies try to bring up their ranking are effective, even against Google's famed efforts to avoid being astroturfed.
This example is probably bogus -- the computer company seems to be more popular than the fruit, or at least there's more for internet users to say about it, so pagerank is probably doing it's job well here. But in other cases, where the commercial alternative isn't as famous as Apple Computer but it still ranks higher in Google searches than non-commercial alternatives, that probably says something about astroturfing.
That or it just reiterates that the web went commercial a long time ago. Take your pick...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Who will be President in 2004?
sulli
RTFJ.
The problem here is not the google page rankings - all the short-comings occur with other methods used by other search engines. A search for "Apple" (as mentioned in the artical) generates just as bad a list on MSN as it does on Google (if you are looking for tips on preventing apple-rot).
The real problem is two fold:
I think the solution for this has already been solved by libraries to a certain extent. Generally, the "search engine" in a library will point you to a shelf, not a specific page in a book. You go to the shelf, and the look at a local seach engine to find the page (book index).
IMHO, site like google should index other specialized search engines, maybe even forwarding on your search to them. Google+ would also have to recognise synonyms and get clarification from the user.
I guess another way would be to move google+ away from being a word index, towards being a expert system that leads the user through a series of questions so that a better understanding is gained of the topic being sort after. Basically, the ES would craft the search term for the user so that more relevant pages are returned.
Despite how much we'd all love to do more MS bashing about propoganda for their new search technology, I say, please. This was just some schmuck journalist trying to generate a lot of hits to his article by taking cheap shots at everyone's favorite search engine. Do you really think this web journalist has the goods on the new uber-secret MS search technology? Do you think Bill Gates is standing over his shoulder wispering what to say about Google into his ear? No, this guy knows no more about MS technological developments than anyone else. You've all been had.
I'd like to propose another googlehole: scientific research. Scientific publishing has a pernicious problem:
1)If you want recognition, and dissemination, you must publish in a recognised, well-known journal.
2)If you want to publish in that journal, you may not publish the same paper elsewhere. (Including the web). You have to give them the copyright.
3)If you want access to the journal, you must have a subscription to it.
[N.B. This applies to most of the prestigious journals; but not to all.]
The result is that scientific research results are restricted. Amateurs, and less well funded institutions are locked out.
Even if you have access, (I have the fortune to be at Cambridge Univerity - we have all the subscriptions) there's still no decent search mechanism. Google is blinded, and the proprietary "Web of Science" is very slow, and will only give you a journal reference, not an actual link to the paper concerned! You then have to track down the journal, locate the paper yourself, and hope that the access to it is available online! Or use a (physical) library.
This means that searches are very inefficient (only the abstracts are indexed), and that they are 2 orders of magnitudes slower.
Changing the system is very hard, because no one wants to announce their exciting discovery in an unknown (and widely unread) journal!
I used 'tulip information' and 'fruit apples' and I got great results. A few shopping place but a fair number of information sites.
I think it's MSN will end up with the same problem after a few years if not immediately. If you type in broad terms such as apple or flowers you will get mostly junk you aren't looking for such as information on tulips or the fruit apple.
MS should stick to infecting the masses with viruses on thier computers.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Don't moderate unless you actually try it.
e =utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=arial
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&i
As you can see, the above is pure and utter bullshit, and probably some googlehaters stupid FUD.
And you modded it up? Great going...
Unfortunately, most of MSN's readers are very unlikely to understand why this article is nonsense. They will never read the reasoned counterpoints expressed in this article thread. Nor will they ever question it.
This article is exactly what the layperson craves. It's controversial and it makes some sense if you fail to do any deep thinking. The masses are going to gobble it all up (even when MSN is a demonstration of what this article complains: example) and look to other sources to save them from the newly created Google menance. To them, Google is now not only a bad search engine, it is also damaging the future of our species by negatively impacting research (*gasp!*).
Of course, this is how all Microsoft FUD plays out. It doesn't fool any of us, but it certainly fools most of them.
Join Tor today!
Sure, you won't get the results you expect if you use bad seach terms!
The writer of this article draws conclusions about "the probelms with Google" but the real problem is that he draws conclusions from examples he derived from really bad search term!
Type in "Apple" and he is shocked that the results for Apple Computer are at the top and the fruit and Fiona Apple are way down the list.
DUH!
Type in "Fiona Apple" or "Apple AND (Tree OR Fruit)" and, surprise surprise, you get A LOT more results that are relevant!
No wonder nobody was willing to pay for Slate subscriptions if this is any indication of the quality of it's reporting.
I agree with people here in that the points raised by the article are somewhat FUDful. However, I do have a MAJOR problem with Google.
I develop in Perl. If you've ever seen Perl code, (as I'm sure many here have,) you know {it=>"isn\'t"} @the=("most", "friendly"); of languages, syntactically. However, with Google, searching for information is a moot point. Try searching for "$|++" (Search Link). For those who don't want to click on the link, I'll tell you what happens: Google does nothing. That's because it doesn't accept punctuation.
This was particularly annoying when I wanted to do research on URThere's (awful) PDA: the @migo. When I searched for "@migo", I got lots of spanish sites, but nothing relative. Google had internally stripped my "@" symbol.
Granted, I will continue to use Google, as it is the most incredible search engine available right now, but because of these flaws, searching is severely limited.
char sig[120] = "\0"
Google is great but, if I search for "big tits" I still don't get the "best results". Some webmasters (if you can call them that) have obviously found a way around Google and its great system of algorithms and page rankings. What we need is a good quality Google-like engine for pr0n. A search engine that tells us where all of the really good stuff is.
'apple fruit'
I skimmed the first 5 pages and there was no mention of Apple computer.
Uh, maybe I am being dumb, but isn't google's purpose to return the most relevant and most popular result to a search.
1. They rank a pages popularity by the number of sites linking to it. So obviously there are more sites linking to Apple Computers than the fruit.
2. I bet 99% of people typing in apple as the search term on Google are actually looking for Apple computers.
So google is behaving as you would expect it to behave.
Whats the problem - no flaw here, move along.
Two things... ;)
1. The flaws pointed out in google's search engine apply to all search engines.
2. There is value in manipulating search results and this is why you will see 1-800-flowers when you search for flowers. Search engine optimization is a booming business. Pagerank had good intentions of controlling google spam however it's still too easy to manipulate - and seo pays too well, very well if i might add,
1. The Evil Empire plans to start up a new, "Google-killing" "search" "engine"
2. The Evil Empire releases a "report"(=~/FUD/) slamming Google.
3. ???
4. Profit!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
isn't like 98% of what people are actually looking for "shopping-related"? I would venture "yes". The simple fact is that while google delivers lots of shopping-related stuff, it also delivers the real meat to anyone willing to think of the "right" words to enter. It's not that hard really, and anyone that thought that entering "apple" in a search engine would bring up their momma's apple orchard home page before apple computer has a lot to learn about the internet.
stuff |
...but the article wasn't really attacking google. It was pointing out some things and giving enough evidence to verify them. Seems like a simple exercise for the reader to check up on the supposed facts used by the writer. And, lo-and-behold, they turn out to be pretty much my experiences as well
Hell, the writer even said that he liked google and used it. Sure, msn.com has their own search engine, and sure they are competing. But having a writer give a quick warning saying 'google is good but not god' isn't a global conspiracy. Really. I think.
All the anti-MS sentiment on /. is causing people to blindly say "It's only because of the search term they use! You can find anything if you use the right search terms!" Well, the fact of the matter is that google _is_ very biased toward commercial endeavors (though probably because there are so freakin' many of them that they just drown out what you actually want)
For example, let's say I want to research whether L-Cartinine (an amino-acid) is effective at increasing mitochondrial efficiency (as I've read) before I buy some. I go to google and type in "L-Cartinine". All I get are sites selling L-Cartinine. No suprise there.
Say I refine my search to "L-Cartinine effectiveness" or "L-cartinine effectiveness mitochondrial efficiency" or even something like "Does L-Cartinine work?" It doesn't matter how talented I am at picking my search terms; I will have to peruse page after page after page of "LOW PRICES ON L-CARTININE!" before I find an actual academic paper of some kind on whether the stuff works.
no, just entries written by fruits......
I'm here all week folks.
flowers
apple
Seems like the pot blaiming the kettle... They do have a few "relevant" links... but mostly it has the same "problem" as Google...
Feh!The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
I've certainly had my issues with Google.
If this hack's complaints are in any way a reflection of what the majority of end-users think after using Google, I have no doubt that MS are hard at work finding ways of delivering "solutions" to those "problems".
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
The article is actually on Slate.com, a site that was acquired by Microsoft and is supposed to be a news content/commentary site - so it's not necessarily the same thing as "the folks at MSN."
One might as well say "the folks over at VA Software..." when linking to a Slashdot article.
It obvious, of course, that our intrepid editors are implying that MSN is using Slate to spread bad PR about Google in prep for their impending Search Engine War (tm). Perhaps so. But if you read the article, it does make some good points (for example: searching for "apple" and only finding links to apple computers stuff).
I'm coming to this "discussion" a bit late so it's not likely I'll be noticed, but the attitude of readers here is truly ignorant.
YES Microsoft owns a share of MSNBC, but that does not mean that it taints ever single article. MSNBC has shown it is more than willing to post articles that are not favorable to the company. And Slate, which this was written on, is a RESPECTED NEWS ZINE. To throw that "value" away by writing a "biased," yet POSITIVE article on google is ludicrious.
To believe that behemoth corporations are hive minds that are solely focused on certain goals throughout their structure is just ignorant.
Trust me, Gates had nothing to do with this article.
Friggin read it.
It's headlined "Digging for Googleholes:
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent."
Did anyone actually bother to interpret that. It says that Google isn't perfect, but it's cleary the BEST. That's what's written between every line. "Google is magnificent, but it could be better". If that's an advertisement for MSN search, then Microsoft's got some more serious problems.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
This article is mostly flamebait, at best. He states that searching for "apple" happens more often when people are searching for the fruit than when searching for the company. He also states that many of the millions of google visitors daily wouldn't refine their search to find the information they wanted.
This is just an article trying to stir up a big fuss about a search engine that works with little to no human intervention.
Glen
Track your fuel economy
Try "search engine" as the search term on both Google and MSN...
:Google:
:MSN: w .searchenginewatch.com/ si/default.aspu ide.com. askjeeves.comw w.yahoo.comr ch.com/ ~yandy/search/Usenet.htmlt m
Regardless of which one gives "beter" results (because it's a stupid search anyway), it's funny to see that neither one lists the other in the first 20 matches.
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IBM execs look to move jobs overseas (CNN)
j ob s.reut/?cnn=yes
July 22, 2003: 6:42 AM EDT
http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/22/technology/ibm_
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two senior officials at IBM, the world's largest computer maker, said the company needs to speed its efforts to move white-collar jobs to India and elsewhere overseas, according to a published report Tuesday.
In a recording of a conference call given to the New York Times by a labor union, top employee-relations executives said IBM needed to make the same moves its competitors have made to save money by shifting service jobs away from the United States.
The Times article cited Forrester Research as estimating 450,000 U.S. computer industry jobs could be transferred overseas in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of U.S. computer jobs.
IBM executives on the March conference call worried that broader unionization could arise as the trend strengthens, the paper reported.
"Governments are going to find that they're fairly limited as to what they can do, so unionizing becomes an attractive option," said IBM (IBM: Research, Estimates) director for global employee relations Tom Lynch on the recording.
"You can see some of the fairly appealing arguments they're making as to why employees need to do some things like organizing to help fight this."
The Seattle-based Washington Alliance of Technology Workers gave the recording, which was on an internal company Web site, to the newspaper after getting it from a company employee who was upset about its content, according to the Times.
Shouldn't that be a strictly non-negative number? If you take abs(0), you get zero.
strangely, i've noticed that in my local supermarket, the buns & hot dogs are marketed in equal numbers.
it might be local to you too: http://www.wegmans.com/
ed
The bias isn't Google's, it's the Internet's. Searches for "flowers" match a lot of online florists and searches for "Apple" turn up hits on Mac computers before Fiona Apple or the common fruit.
Well, so what? Google works by ranking URLs based on how often they're linked to, and a lot more people are going to link to 1-800 FLOWERS than Bob's History of Romantic Flowers in Renaissance Europe.
The only problem, if you can call it that, is that the novice searcher needs to enter more specific words. If I'm looking for lyrics to Liz Phair's song "Supernova", I don't search for "supernova" or even "liz phair" -- I search for "liz phair supernova lyrics" and get at least half a dozen matches that are exactly what I wanted.
There's no such thing as a Googlehole, in the sense the article describes it. Much like Dr. Know in the movie "A.I.", you need to ask for exactly what you want in order to get exactly the answer you need.
Boo freaking hoo. Google isn't perfect. Whyever would MSN be interested in making sure we know it?
This reminds me of creationists pointing out gaps in our knowledge of evolutionary biology and concluding that lack of perfection in science proves that they are right.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Is this verification that Google is vulnerable to astroturfing? If you assume that half of all web pages with the term "apple" are talking about the computer company and the other half are referring to the fruit, then it seems like a search for the term "apple" should bring up about equal numbers of computer & fruit hits.
Uh, no, it means there are a lot more web pages about Apple computer, and links to those pages, than there are pages about apple the fruit. Your assumption is what is wrong.
This example is probably bogus -- the computer company seems to be more popular than the fruit, or at least there's more for internet users to say about it, so pagerank is probably doing it's job well here.
Ah, well, OK then. Your example is bogus. Refreshingly honest of you!
But in other cases, where the commercial alternative isn't as famous as Apple Computer but it still ranks higher in Google searches than non-commercial alternatives, that probably says something about astroturfing.
Er, well, it might, if you were citing other cases. But you cited an example that you yourself say is bogus.
hmmm, i wonder if the 1st result of the word 'apple' in ms' search engine, will get me to the site of apple computers. :)
knowing ms you will find apple.com way back at entry 321.415.432, while MS Office for MacOSX might actually show up nr 1 followed by a thousand apple tree dealers
lets just hope MS doesn't include a 'i feel lucky' button.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
OMG
I searched for 'windows' on google.com and I had to scroll through several pages before I found one that wasn't related to Microsoft Windows. And even then they were links on where to buy and how to install windows. I just want to know what a window is.
This search engine is broken!!
*DrugCheese rants*
Only if you don't know how to use Google properly...
From the article: If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.
Yes, search for flowers, and all but 1 of the top 10 are online florists. However, search for 'tulips' (if you're doing that research paper on tulips), and you get 7 out of the top ten that are about tulips and are NOT florists. Even better, search for (as he suggests) "gardening tips" and you get 10 out of 10 pages for (surprise!) gardening tips... none of which are online florists.
To properly Google, put in as much about the product as you know, or care to know - say you want to know about reviews of the Plextor PlexWriter 48/24/48 CD-RW (I just picked a product at random that was in a pop-up ad), don't search for "CD-RW" or "CD Burners". You could search for "Plextor" and get the company's site as the first listing... or "Plextor Plexwriter" and get the product page from the company as the top listing... or "Plextor Plexwriter 48/24/48 reviews" and get (surprise!) reviews of it.
Use the search engine properly - give it as much info to work with as you can, and you'll always get the best search.
Incidentally, I will almost always refine a search if it returns more than 1000 results. Add a word or two, get it under 1000, and you know that they're all 1000 good hits.
-T
..then maybe they should freely open up their archives for searching. They can still make money off the damn pop-up ads that will surely accompany the archived articles. They can't really be making much money off paid archive searches anyway. The Web is rapidly becoming the world library where everybody does their research. If your works aren't easily searchable and downloadable from the web, they are handicapped in terms of the influence they can have on later research and ultimately will get cited less. Peer review for research articles and journalistic standards are still important, but it is a shame to keep the better quality material hidden in a pay-to-search or subscribe-to-search database while upstart web journals slowly take over. As a researcher, I would prefer that the articles I write are published and searchable on the web by a respected, peer-reviewed web journal, rather than stuck in a moldering library stack and downloadable only if you pay the journal publisher a fee.
This is great. Not only do they point out all Google's weaknesses from the precieved point-of-view of the company that has labeled itself a new major compeditor, but there is this as well:Oh, so God forbid an Internet search engine assumes computers to be a hot topic. Bwahahaha.
Perhaps MSN's writier should try more specific keywords, like searching for "growing apple trees", which yeilds a very nice growing guide as the top link. Or perhaps "Nutrition Information for Apples" ("for" was a very common word and not included in my search), which, also as the top result, gave me this page on health & nutrition information for apples, plus several more sites, including one from a
Sounds to me like MSN needs to create a better Google because they're too dumb to figure out how to use the current one properly...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Pot, kettle, black?
"Apples" probably more what the user wanted.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, you idiots
If FUD doesn't work, Msft can just release the attack lawyers of SCO on Google to pay up for all those illegal Linux systems..
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Search for "apple" on Google
:\
When I first read that I immeadiately thought of Apple Computer. Maybe Google really can read our mins? Or....mine, anyway
The examples may be bad but his point is still valid. You have to understand how a tool works and its limitations before using it.
Examples:
Google reflects the structure of the Internet
Oscilloscopes are low pass filters
PMT have area (all sensors have area)
FFTs smooth over the bin
I was searching for "pirelli p3000 tires review" - there are four good links, followed by hundreds of obvious search engine spam. Doing "-sex" doesn't make much appreciable difference.
I liked Google better before it became popular and thus vulnerable to this kind of crap.
So they hate google. Nothing new.
What's funny is the MSN's search engine is just as bad (okay, okay, it's worse). If you do a simple search on "flowers" as they suggest on MSN, eleven of the first page results are shopping links.
Take the plank out of your own eye.
Certainly those of us familiar with the web know how to refine our searches, but novice users may have difficulty with this. Googlehole No. 2 suggests a way that the search engine could help: the engine could offer the keywords most highly correlated with those searched for as refinement terms, e.g., given "apple," the search engine could offer "fruit", "computer", and "Fiona". I believe this has been done in research systems (by clustering the search results using their keyword frequency vectors), but I haven't seen it in deployed search engines.
I think the fact that google returns shopping results first shows that google is doing its job. Alot of web content is people trying to make a buck. Goole shows the most popular stuff first. Make sense? Pagerank does work: It may have flaws but do you think MSN is gonna come up with anything better? Well even if they come up with something like google it will still have problems with all the proprietary gui crap ware they will put in it and infront of it. Google is fast and accurate something microsoft never gets right. Good luck MSN.
...we may find ourselves in a world where, if you want to get an idea into circulation, you're better off publishing a PDF file on the Web than landing a book deal.
I don't understand, Mr. MSN Man! That sounds awesome! I dunno about you, but I have a damned hard time landing book deals!
Me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aaah, I see. I understand about your average greengrocer not shipping fruit, its just that I was having one of those "Fruit" == "Citrus Fruit" brainouts, and so the idea or ordering fruit online and expecting it to arrive either fresh or undamaged seemed weird.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The original Slate article makes use of a logical falacy. It assumes that if you google for "flowers" the correct response should be general information on flowers. How correct is that over getting sellers of flowers since that is just as correct? The search in question is so generic what possible information could anyone get from it. Google just spits out its best guess since it can't read your mind.
In my studies of information, "general information" is generally useless. It is only useful in refining a search. If you don't know how to begin you may start with a generic search to get an idea where to go to next but the generic information is thrown away. Instead of typing "flowers" into Google which will net unexpected results, how about "how to care for flowers"?
Google, and in my humble opinion, is properly geared to look for specific things. If one types in just "flowers" looking for information on how to grow a daisy or daffodil then you aren't going to get the right information. Google doesn't read minds. It can't tell you want information on how to grow flowers over buying flowers without telling it.
As the parent noted, "flowers" might not have been exactly the best generic question to flag on. Google at its heart measures the presense of information on the Internet. Flower sellers will have far more information and pages than those who have "general" information.
- Advanced search
- in field "with all the words", something like "index Avril Lavigne"
- in field "exact phrase" put PARENT DIRECTORY
- in field "any words", index,
- it's an art, but you can even exclude things like ".jpg", and "cd" to bring it all the way up the first hit
search, and you'll find that mp3 you're looking for.
Eat your heart out RIAA, and it's even cross-platform ;-)
Yeah, I understand the basis of their searches and everything along these lines, but I find it's a real pain for me to have to type in "apple -computer -'steve jobs' -'steve wozniak' -'Silicon Valley' +fruit +eat -'grocery stores' -'buy online'" when all I'm trying to do is find a damn fruit.
... ... ... "
One methodology (which I am presently patenting) is to display some sort of "Synonym Filter". You can intelligently find similarities between different categories of "apple". For Apple Computer you may find a lot of "G4" and "deceptive benchmarking", while for Fiona Apple you might see "Criminal" and "Please eat", and for the fruit you'd see "Washington" and "Red Delicious". So form clusters based on these, and ask the user to narrow their search accordingly.
"We have determined multiple groups for your search 'apple':
Apple Computer
Fiona Apple
Washington Apple Growers
Not to say that I'd have faith in Google to worry about the one-sidedness of their results. I think that they're probably too busy manipulating the Internet so that they can sell their PageRanks or hoarding information about its users which it will sell to Corporations and the Government. here.
He simply does not know how to do searches and, like a lot of people, complains about the tool. He doesn't even realize how many searches are for shopping and price comparison. I think he should have study the problem a lot more before writing...
And even I don't have trouble finding what I am looking for on Google. Maybe the guy just needs to revise his search. Or could there be another more sinister reason to write this article???
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels.
I am a researcher by profession. The cases cited in the article are examples of poor search technique, not poor indexing algorithms. Anyone who puts in scattershot single terms with no site limitations deserves the incredibly skewed and uninformative results they get. Putting in a single word [especially common words like "apple"] to a search engine hasn't been a good technique since about 1996.
You want information on, say, the nutritional value of apples? Go to google and try a well-formed search query such as:
nutrition apples site:.org
[there are many other ways you could form this and almost any query]
Coming from MSN, who naturally want you to use their native search function, this article's assertions are doubly suspect.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Enough navel gazing. There are a lot of valid points in the forum here. Send them to the author at:
http://stevenberlinjohnson.com/
And remember, be mature and be polite.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
> As Winer now puts it: "If you want to be in
> Google, you gotta be on the Web."
WTF does he think google searches if not the Web? His underwear drawer?
What a complete jackass.
...and most search engines is that they are not searching for what i want them to.
For an instance. If i search for "WAN" I don't want to find "Obi wan kenobi".
I want searches to be case sensitive and not ignore special characters (-\.+!@#$%^&*) are ignored in google.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
What's wrong with his analysis? Where do I start? First let me say that most of his statements are true. They just have no real merit for me.
1) Reference basis. In any scientific analysis you need a baseline. For example, if you wanted to compare the fuel economy of two vehicles, it would be good if you established that the baseline should be something like gasoline powered passenger cars. If you compared the gas consumption of a horse drawn carriage to a Ferrari F40, that's not valid. In this case, no reference baseline was established. He was comparing Google to nothing. What if all his gripes about Google were inherent to all search engines?
To make his points, he should at least have some sort of meaningful comparison between browsers: Well, Altavista doesn't do this but Google does . . . I think he omitted this part because the MSN search engine shows many of characteristics he complains about.
2) Testing methodology. When you test anything, each test has to be narrowly designed to test as few factors as possible, and the desired result has to be achievable. In the fuel economy example, it would be silly to complain how poor fuel economy is in a Ford Explorer if you used uranium as the fuel source.
It's ironic that the subtitle is Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent. He was testing the terms 'apple' and 'flowers', yet he was actually looking for 'growing apples' and 'gardening flowers'. But by searching on vague terms, he assured the test would fail. Additionally without a reference (see #1), we don't if this behavior is normal to search engines or just Google.
3) Objectivity. I don't need to elaborate on this.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
- tulip.com - a Dutch PC manufacturer
- www.tuliptoys.co.uk - a children's wooden gift store
- www.goldentulip.com - a travel agency site
- www.tulipfestival.org - The closest match so far: the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
- www.tulip.org - Reformed
Christian theological and teaching resources
- Another tulip festival
- Info on some Dutch university's licensing with the computer dealer referenced in #1
- Linux and the "Tulip" NIC Architecture
- Some Dutch company where I can buy tulip bulbs
- Tulip Software, dedicated to the visualization of huge graphs
Now if I was looking for info on the tulip (the actual flower), would I be a little dismayed by the results? I mean, wow, that's pretty much the kind of crap I'd expect from AskJeeves."Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Johnson states in his article that if you "want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for". So I searched on gardening tips with Google. Guess what - the first page of results were all about gardening tips. The only links to florists were on the right side bar - where they belong. Seems to me Google got it right.
If you search on google with "apple" now, the first they come up with is www.apple.com
Is this "pagerank" editable by the google-crew?
As much as Google (and all relatively unbiased search engines) try to return the most relavent information for a particular query, there are people who make a living and spend their lives trying to spin/rewrite/rework web content so that search engines will rank it higher no matter what search terms as long as they're related. This type of work is not cheap, so it is more likely that FTD has done this than, say, a site on botany.
Well doesn't that just beat all. You mean to tell me the protocol originally meant to help publish physics papers is making people publish physics papers?
Lordy, where will it end?
Yeah, but "foo review" searches are getting less and less useful because of sites like DealTime. I was searching for hardware reviews recently, and I got sick of clicking through to sites that said something like:
"Foobar TWF-69: BUY NOW! 0 reviews posted, add your review"
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Google is updating it's site/search algoritm. And this thing where its finds shopping items is something that is more obvious to me the last year.
Also someone found a hole in the algoritm. Sometimes position 5 to 10 are all linked to some "results on searches for xxx yyy zzz" pages that really are just sponsored links.
One of the concerns of the article was that Google would skew results towards article material. However almost all original research is published in forms of articles in peer reviewed journals, so having google result skew to articles is not necessarily a bad thing.
This article is really stretching it. Let me pick apart their arguments, as I have nothing better to do:
Argument 1: All Shopping, All the Time.
They say that Google puts mostly shopping hits at the top. Though this may be true, it's not completely unstoppable.
Solution:Try putting -buy in a search query.
Argument 2: Skewed Synonyms
They say that finding hits for synonyms of words like "Apple" are hard. Well, it's true, since there are probably thousands upon thousands of ways to interpret a single word search query.
Solution: Try narrowing your results by using better search queries. If you want to find information on Fiona Apple, try searching for "Fiona Apple", and not Apple.
Argument 3: Book Learning
They say that Google doesn't return search results on books that don't exist on the web. But this is only natural, since Google is a web search engine, it can therefore not return results with information not on the freakin' web.
Solution: You want books? Go to a library.
All this entire article seems to do is bitch about how Google's search method sucks, but fails to realize that Google's methods are sound, it's just the quality of the information on the web that's gotten worse.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Vivisimo is a meta search engine that does clustering.
When you search for apple, the first clusters are mostly computer-specific, too, but that simply corresponds to what is on the web (it is different both with Google and Vivisimo when you use apples instead).
But sometimes, the automatic clustering can speed up the search, you don't have to find out yourself which additional (positive or negative) criteria work best (you can, of course still add them if you want).
A few examples of the first few clusters with a few Vivisimo searches:
- apache: Project, Helicopter, Mod/Module, Apache Software, Resources, Native American, XML, Apache Tribe, New Mexico, Technology
- python: Monty Python, Language/Programming, Snake, Book, Ball Python, Active State, Resources/Tools, Python Scripts,
...
- palladium: Microsoft, Platinum, Photos, London Palladium, Element, PCPA/FAQ, Hotel Palladium Palace in Rome,
...
- blair: Tony Blair, Blair Which, Jayson Blair, Blair/Nebraska, Coupons, Clothing, Blair County,
...
I think such clusterings can be useful. Also interesting: Clustering of 2087 Microsoft patents (1996-present) (provided as a demonstration).I have always purchased HUNDREDS, if not THOUSANDS of Granny Smith Apples before I purchased ONE Macintosh.
Perhaps when the Mac is as popular as apples, they can expect to compete!
http://www.google.com/mentalplex/MP_faq.html
And when I search Google for "pussy" I get all kinds of information pussy willows.
Wait... Does that say, "Searched the web for pussy with Safesearch on." Damn...
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
Actually, when referring to a specific kind of "Nazi", both words should be capitalized:
"Grammar Nazi"
I would concur, but for the fact that "grammar Nazi" is not itself a proper noun. Cf. "Misplace that comma and you'll suffer the tender ministrations of the punctuation Mafia." That said ... hmm....
Somewhere in the back of my head, I hear Chef saying: "Now knock it off, boys. That stopped being funny 40 seconds ago." On the other hand, I also hear him saying, a few more fart jokes later, "Heh heh. OK, now it's funny again."
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Funny how this article runs and at this very moment if you search for anything on MSDN for ...(deep breath)... windows programming needs you get overwhelmed with requests to take an online survey.
Forced by my inquisitive nature to participate i found that basically it was a "how can we beat google" survey - not a search engine survey as previously advertised. Not that i think they should never do a google article - but lets not get too obvious (never mind trying to pass it off as news/editorial).
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
There's nothing wrong with pondering the biases of a google-eye view of the world, the trouble with this article is that it just doesn't do that good a job of it. It also might be better to focus on practical techniques you can use to search differently, rather than act like you've discovered some great flaw in google... It seems to me that the real trouble with Google's Pagerank is stunningly obvious: it's biased toward the status quo of what everyone things is true, or at least interesting. If you always start at the top and work you're way down, by definition you're always going to see the stuff that a large body of people have approved of already. Is there room in this system for new ideas to percolate up? It might be interesting to start a "bottomfeeders" weblog. Every week you pick a topic of interest, google it, and start looking through the links that they've ranked down at the bottom. There are other pretty simple techniques that might be worth a thought... yes it's annoying that google won't let you search on punctuation (though this isn't just a google problem, in the old days I always wanted to do an altavista search for site names with a tilde in them, to find pages put up by individuals rather than some slick dotcom...). But if you got a perl problem, you use google to find some perl sites, and then use their search engines to look for info on $| or whatever... Oh, and has anyone given a thought to what's going to happen when google finally goes public? How long do you think the "Don't be evil" philosophy is going to last, then?
Here is a link to a /. article about MSN planning to take on google.
In summary...
MS moving on to step 2 of their dominate the market strategy for searching: FUD
Wow, MSN is absolutly right... For example, I searched for "automotive racing" and I did not find ONE SINGLE LINK to the French revolution! Can you believe that? It's all skewed to stuff about car parts, what the hell?
Why should I have to change my search terms to fit with what I am looking for, it's that the search engine's job? Good thing MSN Search can read my mind.. It knows all I ever want to see is links to Microsoft products.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
So, MSNs getting a little self ritghtous about search engines in anticipation of the launch of the Microsoft search engine. Lets see how they stand up to thier own criticism. Just to be fair, well just count the first ten results on the page, as that is what we'll see on Google
Criticism 1: All Shopping, all the time:
flowers(MSN) Result: 7 sites selling flowers, 2 informative sites (one of which is part of MSN, and 1 site for searching yellow pages (also MSN). 80% comercial, 20% informative (and 20% self promoting).
flowers(Google) Result: 7 sites selling flowers, 2 informative sites, 1 selling flower themed e-cards. 80% comercial, 20% informative
Criticism 2: Skewed Synonyms:
apple(MSN) Result: 9 sites about Apple computers, 1 site about apple recipes (on MSN) 90% "skewed synonym", 10% traditional meaning (80% comercial, 20% informational and 10% self promoting)
apple(Google) 10 sites about Apple computers. 100% "skewed synonym" (80% comercial/promotional 20% tech support)
Criticism 3: Book Learning
This one's a little difficult to test, because what Mr. Johnson pretends to be concerned about is more due to the economics of publishing and the web than to anything that Google has control over. It seems that the concern is over Google's indexing of PDF files, but not indexing these files would leave out important archives of information that are published online in that format, such as most of the documents in George Washington University's National Security Archives. I don't think that there's a legitimate argument for not indexing PDFs, and I find it a little disturbing that some search engines do not. Google's ability to search for specific file formats has enabled me to weed out the nutcase sites, and returned a higher percentage of useful results when looking for Government documents for my research.
All in all, I find little difference between the two search engines when doing simple, one-word searches. MSN's web search is is just as guilty of Mr. Johnson's first two criticisms as Google. MSN's web search is intended as a marketing tool, not a user service. Looksmart accepts payment for better rankings and "expidited review". I doubt the new search engine Microsoft will unveil will be much different.
At least on Google, no one has to pay to get listed.
You just have to get linked.
Read, L
ok i hate to do this, but i love google so heres my angry flame along with the other 1billion posted here.
/. my inbox! lol
<FlameOn!>
googlehole #1. the search subjects were intentionaly broad, and in todays modern world if you seacrh for just a product, odds are your looking to buy it, so what does google do? it provides a mirad of links to retailers. if you intended to find product specs try doing a search for "blah produck specs"! wow i got 300 pages of product reviews!!!
googlehole#2. skewed synynoms. ok so i searched for "apple" im online, apple is the worlds 2nd largest computer retailer, i wonder why i got 100+ pages relevent to apple! im online! anyone see a technological link here? your on the inter net, i want an apple. try "apple fruit" or "apple -computer" duh!
googlehole#3. book learning, ok so i want some information, i goto google and do a search on it, i dont see any books here! whats going on, well what the fuck did you msn fuck heads expect, books to pop out of your computer screen, research on the internet is ment as an additive to library research. i would imagin if google did start displaying books in pdf format the publishers would go on an riaa sueing spree! the newyour times "closed archives" isnt googles fault, it is the direct result of an action by the nyt, CLOSING THEIR ARCHIVES! and besides if i wanted news, news.google.bom works great! thats probably 50% of the reason they put it up!
finally if a "group mind doesnt speak for everybody, it does speak for the majority of the groop. an important idea to remember in customer services if that you cant please everyone all the time, but you can please most most of the time!" which is exactly what google does! by the logic of a group mind, the people who use the web orginize it how they like, google searches the web to turn up the most relevent results to this "group mind", well if this group mind involves most the web users, wouldnt that be who google's targeting? google seems kinda like a democracy, what msn's article is trying to state is that. "google sucks because it cant read your mind, and orginize the web for you the way you want it"
and let us not forget that msn is trying to push the popularity of their search engin over that of speficaly google!
most, if not all of these "googleholes" can be overcome by using sensable searches for topics.
the problem is not google, or even the webs orginization, its simply that some users and the author of this article do not understand how to perform a search!
all i see in this article is a short winded "msn is better because we said so, and now were gonna bash google to prove it" bullshit article!
im not posting ac, and id like to hear any arguments aganst my opinion, just dont
<FlameOff!>
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
apple -computer -mac -fiona -newton or apple fruit Hit the submit button after either for the amazing results. Imagine this, I put in the word orange and Google didn't psychically know that I was looking for fruit again!
Because most price comparison sites use the word review relative to the online shop selling the item. The problem is one of context and it should be a simple one to solve - google needs some words to be defined as keywords - "review" being one of them. (obviously you would want to have the ability to opt out of the keyword consideration)
Attention:
TOM ST DENIS CANS THE MAN HAM!
This has been a public service announcement.
I did a study in September last year ("Buying bestsellers online: A case study in Search and Searchability") that examined how well the four major search engines at that time (Google, AllTheWeb, MSN and AltaVista -- Froogle didn't exist) could find pages from which you could buy bestselling books. It's hard to argue that a general purpose search engine shouldn't return at least one transactional page in their top results (to fulfill transactional search). However it wouldn't be so good for a general purpose search engine to return only transactional pages.
I found that Google and MSN search performed the best (i.e. they returned a transactional page early on -- although MSN search was a bit fishy, as if they had a deal with Walmart) and that Amazon had the best coverage of all the bookstores.
The paper is available here.
But if you're just interested in looking at pretty graphs the presentation I gave based on the paper is probably of more interest (pdf) OR (powerpoint).
anyone who mentions the fact that one can use more than one word to describe what they are searching for gets modded up. Although I don't think that anyone who reads /. is unaware of that fact. But there are over 500 messages by now so it's too late.
Google should have one little line above the edit box saying "Use More Than One Word To Describe What You Are Looking For To Get Better Results".
Imagine going to the librarian and saying "Apple", what will you get? most likely another question to specify what you want, or if you are hungry but if not then you would probably get the same type of results as google, less the computer and commercial bias.
This article was written independantly and it just so happens to have appeared in Slate later.
Note he never mentions MS in the article. So lets leave out the MSN speculation. I'm tired of reading such speculation this far down the threads.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Article about Macintosh apples
Might not match any documents, but sure does match the ad for MSN!
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
"apple" as a singular is FAR more likely to be talking about a single apple, which will occur more frequently in the computer sense. If you search for "apples", you'll find you get what you're looking for straight away.
:)
You could even do an "I'm feeling lucky!" search
... and then there were none
How come nobody mentions Vivisimo and Teoma in this context? They happen to present the results for different meanings of the word "apple", although they cannot read your minder neither, very much like Googe. They only make it easier for laymen and novices to see that there are other "meanings" for the same search term.
However, this discussion is also blatantly Anglo-centric. In the rest of the world, "Apple" is even more strongly connected to the computer manufacturer (or the Beatles!). Try appel, Apfel, manzana, or pomme in Google and see what you'll find then (or take a look here.
Neither can I, but at least I have a grasp of what it means.
There are sources, that no matter how hard they try, will never been able to gain the trust of inquiring people that see how opinionating in a certain way may benefit the source of the "opinion".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The artickle is bad in so many ways, I simply lack words. Looks like it was written by a high school kid. I see no references to actual research saying that people are having any problems with *unrefiuned* queries being biased. By no even my grandma knows to refine a search.
When the heck is Google going to add a NEAR operator? Altavista has had this since its inception, but Google continues to lack it.
All the freaking time, I get way too many irrelevant "matches" from Google because looks across the entire document for my search terms.