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: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 :)

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.