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

maybe

[SeXy_Red]

Maybe it has something to do with the counter that was meantioned in a slashdot post earlyer today?

COMMON searches?

[Sycraft-fu]

Ok, now I'm a guy who deals with audio equipment on a regular basis. This, of course, includes speakers. I have never, ever, heard of a speaker bracelet, and can't imagine why one would search for it.

Now this isn't to say that these people havn't perhaps discovered an interesting bug in Google, but trying to play it as a conspiracy for "common" search terms is bullshit. The terms listed are things that no normal person would EVER search for. Hell, they are terms that even someone involved with one of the terms would never search for. Bracelets have nothing to do with speakers. If Google was truly trying to push advertisers, well, they'd be doing a shitty job of it since only geeks with too much time on their hands would discover such things.

Give it a rest, the world is not out to get you. It's either a bug, or Google having some fun (something they are known to do). They are certinaly not trying to pimp a certian manufacturer of speaker bracelets, since such a thing is something that noone would know about, care about or want to own.

For regular searches, Google continues to work great.

Hello? You're kidding, right?

[WIAKywbfatw]

What a cockamamy way to run a search engine.

You are kidding, right? There's a reason that Google is by far the most popular search engine on the web, and it's got a lot to do with the "cockamamy" way it's run.

Perhaps you prefer the good old days when you'd have to check half a dozen search engines and trawl through countless useless links until you found something that was useful.

There are a handful of websites that should be in everyone's bookmarks. Top of the list is Google. Nuff said.

Oh, and as several people will have mentioned by now, and as Google's FAQ surely does, putting your search parameter in quotes will give you exact phrase results. This is pretty standard amongst all search engines, so it's amazing that you don't know this already.

Either you're new to the web and search engines in general or you haven't got a clue how to use one. Regardless, if you're going to comment on how "cockamamy" Google is, you should at least have an idea of how to use it first.

Maybe they're tweaking

[Kieckerjan]

Obviously, Google has to do a lot of acrobatics to keep its service as fast as possible. One of the things it does is distributing its database over a lot of servers. There is no way that they can dynamically sift through hundreds of millions of pages for each common word, so they obviously just look at the top pages for each word. Which pages are top is probably determined by pagerank or something similar.

When you do this, there is no guarantee that you will get hits for every single combination of words out there. However, it may very well be possible to calculate the probability of relevant results not showing up and using this measure to make a more or less optimal trade-off between response time and user satisfaction.

When you start tweaking this trade-off, certain queries are bound to get screwed up. It probably takes them some time to notice this behavior, gather statistics and re-tweak their formula.

Another thing that crossed my mind recently is that they might be using precooked phrases or word collocations instead of single words. This makes sense since they use an implicit AND operator, it improves statistics and words are often strongly correlated anyway so your vocabulary probably wouldn't swell as much as you'd expect.

Mind you, this is pure speculation. I don't have any intimate knowledge about Google's inner workings.

Re:Corporate entity

[dasmegabyte]

Slashdot (tm). Where reality is (-1, Flamebait).

Seriously, you know what make google so great? Part of it's the interface. Part of it's the software. But most of it is the company. The clout to afford enough bandwidth to spider the earth on a routine basis. The cash to maintain thousands of servers and a complicated database with which to serve not only their engine, but a CACHE of pretty much everything they index.

No open source project will ever have the ability to do these things. Because the people who are good enough salesmen to get the revenue needed to do what google does won't want to dillute their position by allowing any hacker with a gimpbox to run the same engine. And the people who are good enough open source software designers to write an engine like google wouldn't want some ad guy treating their work like it was inktomi. You can't run a search engine without money, and you can't run an OSS project like a truly commercial enterprise.

At the end of the day, distributed software doesn't lend itself well to large, FAST, searchable databases. And if this is -1, Flamebait, I guess you may flame away.