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.)

Comments

Google Whackiness

[BJZQ8]

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.

Re:Google Whackiness

[singleantler]

I think this is partly to do with the work they're trying on moving blogs back down the rankings, I've had higher rankings on some of my own sites than I expected recently.

The link farms do get caught, I know a local company that got their own and several customers sites banned for everything except the specific names of the companies. Sometimes it takes a while, so if you see something that you think is a link farm, mail them about it or post it in the relevent Google newsgroup, apparently they do check them and it helps them find people who are using nefarious means to get a high ranking.

Re:Google Whackiness

[Cpyder]

I too am experiencing this more and more during the past few weeks (months?)..

For example when searching for visual basic decompiler the second to fourth results are 'spam sites'.

I always report this kind of crap via the "Dissatisfied with your search results?"-link, but apparently nothing is done against this sites, which are getting more and more annoying.

Time to switch?

Re:It still can't do phrase searches

[Xentax]

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

Re:What's wacky with Slashdot?

[jamie]

Since you asked :)

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 :)

speaker bracelet two

[ballpoint]

Results 1 - 10 of about 27,300

Weird. Very weird. Adding another word to a search should narrow down the result set, not widen it.

Try it.

Re:Canuck Ok

[puppet10]

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.

Re:groups/deja is also acting up

[shird]

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.

Re:Something I've noticed recently...

[arkanes]

Thats because "vb.net" is a URL, and google treats it like one. It actually returns exactly one result, a link to vb.net, as it should.

If you're looking for the product "VB.NET", you need to search for it as a term.

Re:Something I've noticed recently...

[1u3hr]

...is that a search for VB.NET does not return any results either unless you perform an "Exact Phrase" search.

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.

Re:It still can't do phrase searches

[arkanes]

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".