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What's Wacky with Google?
There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For maybe a week, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but there are certain two-word combinations of common words like
candle truck
or
speaker bracelet.
Reversing the order can affect searches too:
motorcycle candles
vs.
candles motorcycle.
The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Read the
Search Basics,
compare your notes to
GoogleWhack's,
have fun looking for patterns, but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers.
(Update: 13:56 GMT by J : When I first posted this story it said the problems have been occurring "for several weeks at least" -- but it seems to be more like one week.)
it was called googlewhacking.
Has anyone else noticed that the "spam" sort of sites that are nothing but link farms and Gator popups are getting much better at finding their way into Google's rankings? I switched to Google back in the day after search engines like altavista became overrun with such sites. Now I've noticed that they occasionally creep into their rankings...I guess entropy is the way of the universe after all.
I've been seeing the same thing. At first I thought my browser but it did it in IE, Opera and Mozilla so it couldn't be the browser. I have also observed that it happens on different machines too.
At the risk of making you look bad, for phrase searches you have to put the phrase in quotes.
For example, I searched for "to be or not to be" phrase origin , and got what I consider to be useful results.
YMMV, of course.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I always put phrase searches in quotes.
Links 8 and 10 in the results might be useful, but they do not contain the exact phrase I was searching for.
Perhaps because the second series of numbers has a first member with three digits. It looks like a US phone number.
No, stories don't have to move through the cluster, and there's no concurrency bug. We have a front-end cluster of webheads but they all read from the same DBs. The only "moving through" is from our main DB to our replicated slave reader DBs, but they are typically only 0 to 1 seconds behind reality, so that's not an issue.
In this case, the problem was that Hemos and I were both editing the story at the same time. He added an icon and posted it at 9:36 EDT live, then I tweaked the text and posted it at 9:38 which was about 40 seconds in the future, then around 9:39 I went back and edited its time back to 9:36... so there were a few seconds there where the story went from front-page to subscriber-only and back.
The Slash backend is obviously too powerful for idiots like us :)
Actually, it's NOT about Googlewacking. It's about weird searches that only SHOW 1 result out of several thousand. A googlewack is a search with exactly one result, not one SHOWN result.
AND, as some people probably noticed, the second half of the article wasn't there when it first came up, notably including the GoogleWack link. Why they didn't add the latter part as an "Update:" is beyond the likes of me.
Ass.
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
I explained here.
Weird. Very weird. Adding another word to a search should narrow down the result set, not widen it.
Try it.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Interesting...
my third result is Digital Video, which doesn't have "google" in it at all...
Could it be? Google is not perfect? Or are they exerting subtle mind-control techniques?four nine eighteen twenty-7 thirty-nine forty-7 fiftyeight sixty-nine seventy-9 eighty-8 one-hundred-and-nine one-twenty
Put
216.239.37.99 www.google.com
In your hosts file to force it to resolve to the US google, or just type that in your browser.
Alternately you can search google for the other googles and connect to them through google, for google japan, google australia, or google canada for example - or you can just hit the go to google.com link at the bottom of the google.ca page which links to http://www.google.com/ncr which I guess disables the country recognition and could be used as a bookmark as an alternative to modifying the hosts file.
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Google are aware of this problem and are working on it. I know cause I wrote to them with some example URIs and they replied they are working on some known issues with their servers.
I.O.U One Sig.
A few days ago I searched for "kazaa lite" on Google and found that no results are censored! The main KaZaA Lite page was the 1st result. That was only temporarily, of course, because right now the search is still censored.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The words are common, not the searches.
Google's count of all pages that matches is just an approximation (obviously - they use the word "about"). I've noticed results with say 4 pages of results and when I click to the 4th, I get the same results as the 3rd page because there really *isn't* a next page.
;)
The results reported in this story are really bad, though - never seen anything like it myself! I'd have to guess that they're tweaking their algorithm and it's not handling some of the cases properly. No time to RTFA - gotta go!
it is a bug if it decides to put quotes that I never asked for around the phrase
It's a feature, which you can turn off in alltheweb.com's preferences. It is turned on initially because most web users don't know as much about how to work a search engine as the typical Slashdot user knows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Dont forget The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
If you're looking for the product "VB.NET", you need to search for it as a term.
For ordinary searches, punctuation marks like "." are treated as spaces, which mean logical ANDs. And some words (in this case "vb" and "net") are ignored as being too common. If you search for "vb.net", which I suppose is what you get from an "exact phrase", you find "vb" followed by a space or punctuation and then "net".
Google tries to be intuitive, which means guessing what most people would expect, which of course means that sometimes you're surprised.
From what I recall and the way things seem to work now, the + operator has been changed slightly.
By default, words like "to" "with" and "by" are not included in a search because they are deemed too common. However, I used to be able to force inclusion of those common words using the + operator.
Now it seems that this is no longer possible. That is, the strings one +to another and one +for another give the same results (without quotes). In fact, the + is replaced by a space in the above queries and that definitely didn't used to be the case.
Does anyone else remember the good ole' + operator?
Google doesn't do simplistic phrase matching. If it did, it'd be the same (and as useless) as altavista. Google does relevancy searches. tobeornottobe.com is relevent to a search for "to be or not to be".
(Update: 13:56 GMT by J: When I first posted this story it said the problems have been occurring "for several weeks at least" -- but it seems to be more like one week.)
Actually, I've been seeing this problem occasionally for over a year. It just seems that larger numbers of search terms trigger it now.
Of course, I can't remember any of the search terms that have triggered it in the past--I've just learned to change my terms slightly to get around the problem.
Dee