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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.)
I am so glad someone else noticed this!!! I've been so pissed I haven't been able to get any speaker bracelets recently. God google... forcing me to use other search engines to get my fix.
SkyNet is becoming self-aware.
It's just a glitch in The Matrix, of course.
What possesses someone to try such weird random words in google. Thats the real trick...google wrote an engine to amuse the crazy users.
That's why you can't trust google for anything critical. You are at their mercy, and if they choose to do biased, or screwed up searches, you either don't know, or can't do anything about it...
I propose an opensource web based search engine... No more weirdness, no more screwups, no more censorship!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I am sure the next Google Zeitgeist will show numerous searches for candle truck or speaker bracelet in October 2003. And nobody at Google will have an explanation for this ;-)
Check out this - all 25 hits on the quoted words "candle truck" should be showing up in the non-quoted search ...
Maybe it has something to do with the counter that was meantioned in a slashdot post earlyer today?
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
it was called googlewhacking.
for a few weeks, when I do a search on google groups, it'll come back with the results just fine - but when I click on the View Thread on a result, it tells me it can't display the thread and gives me a link to view that individual message. Then once that message comes up, I click on View Thread on that message, and up pops the whole thread, like it should have before.
:)
Perhaps being on the top is getting to their CPU's
or maybe its the Google dance!
-dk
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.
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 realized the other day that although searching for 13 - 867 - 5309 causes google to go into calculator mode, searching for 123 - 867 - 5309 does not cause google to use calculator mode.
All sorts of odd things will both pull up an answer from google's calculator and also do a search - for example, searching for avogadros number or hbar.
So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator? Is it because some design decision makes it impossible to trigger both calculator and their phone lookup service. (Yes kids, google is a reverse phone directory, albeit with old data)
"q=site:www.google.com google" - (third result)
This is what I'm seeing...
http://www.sminkybang.com/google.png
By the way, for info on Google's purchase of the search engine Kaltix, check this controversial Register piece by Andrew Orlowski. It contains the highly suspect, matter-of-fact comment that "PageRank is now widely acknowledged to be broken," but if you take the PageRank speculation with a grain of salt it's an interesting read.
I think it may take a while for the stories to move through the cluster (there is a cluster right) because when I first saw the story the link "Read More" told me that I couldn't view this page unless I was a subscriber. I clicked it a couple more times and the same thing, then I reloaded the first page and I could get through. Probably some kind of concurrency bug involving subscription auth and story posts.
should produce about 50% error rate or we are really in trouble ;-)
For any who are interested, Google.ca is behaving correctly. All search results listed (that I've tried so far) from googlewack.com are working properly and returning 1-1 of 1, or displaying as they should.
I wish I could compare to google.com, but for the past year or so, google.com automatically forwards all canadian IP's to google.ca
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I know personally when i've been searching google of late for things like home improvement how to's and the like such as bathtub refinishing it is linking to TONS of commercial sites selling products and service but hardly any online howto's or guides. Granted I realize maybe there just isn't much content for these topics but google seems to be selling out more and more to commercial links. I've also notice this although not nearly as much in looking for other things more and more and some of the searches are for things listings etc which could not likely have a commercial equivalent or likely reason to be on a commercial page.
Does anybody else see the story change? I'm getting two different versions if I reload. One with the additional lines:
"The order of words matters also, with motorcycle candle revealing different results to candle motorcycle."
"Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's"
and one without.
Complete text of the two versions are:
"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 several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet are affected. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Have fun looking for patterns but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
and
"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 several weeks at least, 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."
Strange.
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.
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 :)
Not wanting to kill anybody, we wait until the last two guys wander up to the candle truck.
I prefer not to even click on that one, and just speculate.
The coolest voice ever.
It's broke. Just put a sign on it and someone call the super.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
what if such OSS search engine is massively distributed?
Since by its nature search engine is not a transactional application, it can be effectively broken into thousands and thousands of semi independent pieces (just like real Google works now).
Anyone aware of Distributed Open Source Powered-by-people search engine project?
Um, yeah. Actually, I don't know what you're talking about. Entering the phrase "to be or not to be" -- with quotes, so as to indicate you want the phrase, not just the collection of words -- yielded the first two pages of results all having that phrase. Not all of them were for pages on Shakespeare, but then again, that phrase is now deeply buried in the common memespace. If you make the search phrase
you do indeed get results with the phrase and exclusively referring to Shakespeare. Oh, I get it. You don't like the idea you need to actually construct a reasonable search phrase. You're mad that Google isn't, I don't know, telepathic. Your best bet is the SFWIWNFWIS search engine -- search for what I want, not for what I say.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Mwahhahahah!
1. Register speakerbracelet.com
2. Be the top 1 of 2 search results on google.
3. ????
4. Profit!
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
I've read that there's a real time search monitor in the lobby of Google's HQ. The nastiest words are removed, but other than that you can se exactly what people are searching for.
They have to be pretty confused right now, when thousands of searches for speaker bracelets, motorcycle candles and candle trucks show up on the display!
Martin
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.
searching google for stone dog quote returns no results. Also try stone cat quote or changing the order of the words for weird results. Queries on alltheweb or altavista return numerous results, as expected. This has been reported in threads in alt.usage.english, rec.puzzles and (of all places) alt.fan.tolkien.
I explained here.
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
You should post your exact search, and what exactly you're searching for, if you want some help on this. The entire first page of the search I linked was (arguably) useful.
Oh, and one detail about your original post: The bit about which pages are shown is a little backwards. Google ranks pages with your search on it based on how many other pages out there link to the candidate page (regardless of their content, or at least without specific respect to whether or not those pages contain the search terms). I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's the short version.
So, if you're searching for "Xentax", your top results will be pages with Xentax, which are heavily linked to from other indexed pages. It's good for finding *popular* pages relating to a search, moreso than finding obscure webpages (by design).
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
.....in the Matrix? Have we found it?
.. a month or two ago, a friend's hyperagressive cat was prescribed an antidepressant(!). I was curious so I did a google search on "feline paxil" and got very low quality and repetitive search results; most of the top few screens appeared to be related scams by online pill-pushers trying to get you to use their "search engine".
Perhaps some of google's anti-spamming countermeasures have backfired?
For even more fun, use the following script to generate two random words:
/usr/share/dict/words` /usr/share/dict/words`
(watch for word wrap)
#!/bin/sh
#
dl=`wc -l
RND=`date '+%H%S%d%M'`
RND1=`date '+%y%S'`
RND=`expr $RND + $RND1`
bilge=`expr $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND`
dw1=`expr $RND % $dl`
dw2=`expr $bilge % $dl`
echo `sed -e ${dw1}p -e ${dw2}p -e d
So far, "pectoral undaunted", "adjudicates battlefield", "numerous quark" and "camouflaged todays" work as expected in google.
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.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
Maybe they are doing testing to ensure the service will be in the usual Microsoft standards in case they are bought.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
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.
I wonder when this slashdot discussion will show up in the search results.
I used to use motorcycle candles but later found that an electric headlight is much brighter and doesn't blow out when I move.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
I've been getting an issue for weeks now where I'll do a newsgroup search, click on a match's "Show Thread" link and get an error that the thread isn't available. If you go back and try again, it works. Annoying, but not life threatening, at any rate...
... and the crazy users wrote scripts to use the Google engine!
(shameless self plug) Its surprising what sites can appear when querying Google. Try my site that queries Google with random words to find random webpages. Its quite powerful and a good timewaster.
" At the risk of making Google look bad, decent search engines automatically add quotes to common phrases."
That is far worse than producing mostly-accurate results. The decision of whether or not to treat a search as an exact phrase or as a group of words that can be scattered in the document should be left to the user. What you describe would produce very inaccurate results:
If I want to search for any document containing mojo and rising, and I enter
mojo rising
with no quotes in the engine, it is a bug if it decides to put quotes that I never asked for around the phrase and drop off all results that do not contain the words right next to each other.
google uses tons of DB entries to cross-index pages. I wonder if there's some simple hash-tables per page that it uses internally to speed things up that makes assumptions, and doesn't resolve collisions.
So you can search for one thing, and conceivably the checksum/hashes for each term match those of another page that has nothing to do with it, and it's returned as a relevant match by accident.
This might explain a lot of result sillyness.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I just did a google search for lamp scapula and got 666 results. Obviously there is something inherently evil in lamp scapula. All good Christians should expunge any phrase that combines those two words from their vocabulary immediately.
Man, no wonder... You need to turn Safe Search OFF when you look up nasty stuff like that.
Look at the HTML source. Around the results for the Candle Truck, they start several tables that never get closed, including the TR's and TD's.
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?
Here's Googles somewhat hilarious cache of the Mamufilms.com page. The page includes links for everything from "Peter Paul and Mary mp3" to "preteen bra images". The text is vaguely reminiscent of actual gramatical English. Here's one sentence:
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
Troll, but...
Click the "cached" link; google will tell you if the page contains the phrase or if its only linked from sites that contain the phrase. Nobody cares, though, 'cause "2BEE or nottoobee" is either exactly what you were looking for, or easily ignored based on the title, summary and domain name.
Remember that google is not trying to be pedantic, its trying to be USEFUL. It's taking your search terms or phrase and returning what it thinks are the pages most likely to satisfy your request. In my opinion, google does this brilliantly.
I still don't know why people bring up historical search engines in comparison to google. Most of the complaints boil down to sour grapes: for the record, I too think it sucks that you can't open the window on the airplane.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Google reps is going to be on campus (Purdue University) today for a technical presentation. If there are any questions you want me to ask them reply to this thread. I'm 99% sure I'll be able to attend.
I too think it sucks that you can't open the window on the airplane.
Ironic, considering that it would suck if you could...
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
I would argue you get one link to a page that does not contain the phrase - the "2Bee or Nottoobee". The other one I assume you're referring to is tobeornottobe.com, which I think is an absolutely sensible thing to offer when searching on "to be or not to be".
So, at minimum, I would accept that there is 90% accuracy in its top 10 results.
That said, I think I (and a lot of other people) disagree with you about what a search engine is. You compare it to a database query, which is sensible, seeing as a search engine is obviously going to depend on a database. However, I think the databse query is merely a process for answering what is, ultimately, not a database question but an ontological one.
When I type "to be or not to be" into Google, I am not merely querying a database for all pages that contain that phrase, and asking them to be listed according to a nebulous page rank. I am asking the far more subtle question "What page am I looking for right now? I'll give you a clue - 'to be or not to be'."
Thinking about the latter question instead of the former may clear up some of your problems.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
Google searches use unique and proprietary algorithms to find the most useful information for the search terms. We all know this, it is their "page rank" system. But perhaps the page rank system is driven by more modifiers than we are aware of. For instance, In Minnesota, Twins and Vikings mean a couple of sports teams, in Norway, they probably mean something entirely different so perhaps "Page Rank" does some regionalization. In the same vein, it may be possible that if I refine my search from Minnesota by adding the word "Gopher" to the Twins and Vikings, I may get more, rather than fewer results while perhaps in Norway I'd get no results!
In addition to possibly regionalizing searches, perhaps Google's servers are not updated with the latest code at the same time. Maybe the code is distributed over time to servers so that if a problem were discovered it could be more easily rolled back. It is possible that the load balancing on these servers uses some component of the IP address or somehow regionalizes the incomming requests so that it is likely that the same user usually gets to server A but sometimes goes to server B while their co-surfer neighbor usually goes to server B but sometimes goes to server C. Meanwhile, a couple of states away, another user usually connects to server W but sometimes connects to server X. This could explain why they usually but not always get the same results but someone else gets different results.
In reality you can search for anything within quotes and get what you where looking for. (e.g. ' "candles" "motorcycles" ' ) That's what I've always done on google. It's a more effective search.
The pigeons are getting tired.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
How aware are the search engines of each other? These returns are pages found searching in these search engine databases for themselves and others. Google and Yahoo rather casually mention the number of pages returned, prefaced with "... of about ..."; while AltaVista and Lycos are considerably more anal about reporting quantitative findings.
Google AltaVista Lycos Yahoo
Google 93,000,000 5,817,435 22,483,511 24,300,000
AltaVista 2,050,000 1,821,362 9,179,642 3,090,000
Lycos 18,500,000 2,309,191 11,215,263 6,950,000
Yahoo 95,300,000 10,284,666 55,680,102 38,400,000
e.g. Lycos found 22,483,511 pages mentioning Google, while only about half that many mention itself (Lycos). Perhaps this leads to poor search engine self-esteem issues.
Further exercises in pointless database introversion are left to the reader.
I spoke with a friend who helps maintain the google engine. She said that they were running into some problems with a "cleaning agent." Because of all the sites taking advantage of the word revelancy, there are useless sites that simply have a list of words or phrases. It's been posted before that there are many pages designed for GATOR/GAIN spreading or other spyware/adware. She quoted the percentage of junk pages being at 35% to 40%. The cleaning agent was supposed to run through its own searches and check for junk and keep a log.
She didn't say if the problem was that the cleaning agent was clogging searches or if any logged junk pages had been blocked. If so maybe the agent is flawed. In any case, they've stopped using it for the time being.
append -porn to your search to get all the motorcycle candles you want, except the pornographic ones.
2*31*37*263
The counts have been broken for the last five weeks. A count for the word "the" produced fairly consistent results until then of about 3.4 billion. Then it shifted five weeks ago to 5.2 billion. Lately it has been under 2 billion. Now it's just over 2 billion.
Webmasters who have various directories and know exactly how many pages are in each directory, began noticing five weeks ago that Google was reporting approximately twice the number of pages in each directory than have ever existed in that directory. Prior to five weeks ago, Google used to be fairly close to the actual number (assuming that you get a full crawl).
GoogleWatch speculates on the reason why Google has been behaving strangely ever since it stopped doing the traditional deep crawl once per month. The last standard deep crawl was in April but it wasn't used -- Google threw out this data (by their own admission) and reverted to earlier data. The speculative piece was written last June.
Since it was written, Google has started showing "supplemental results" on many searches. It looks like they are running a parallel index. Why would they do this? All the problems Google has been having, along with the supplemental index, seem to support GoogleWatch's theory.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
... presumptuous (though 'helpful' is the term I'd use), pick a different search engine.
No, really.
Google's design premise, and one which MOST people like for MOST searches, is that it is NOT just a pattern-matcher, and that it does NOT simply show you the webpages with the most or best match to your search request.
It *also* considers how popular each "hit" page is, in terms of how many other webpages out there link to the page in question. It also does other things that I'm sure they haven't divulged, to (for example) stymie attempts to inflate the page ranking of your own site by creating other dummy sites that link to it, etc.
Google (and really any modern search engine) try to find what you're looking for, which (more often than not) cannot be simply summed up with a few search terms. If you want something less
Xentax
You shouldn't verb words.
Duplicating search terms has an interesting result:
candle truck
1-1 of about 101,000
candle candle truck truck
1-1 of about 82,200
candle candle candle truck truck truck
1-1 of about 73,700
candle candle candle candle truck truck truck truck
1-1 of about 68,600
Another interesting one is
candle candle truck
1-2 of about 89,200
I hate it when a FAQ about X (in this case, GoogleWhack) fails to answer the basic question, What is X?
So, that said -- what the heck is GoogleWhack?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
Yeah, I recently was looking for the NATO phonetic alphabet and Googled for "hotel lima golf" as the first three things that popped into my head.
:)
Unfortunately, what came back was a bunch of pages advertising hotels with golf courses in Lima, Peru. So that technique doesn't work all the time.
Lots of things are "popular" that most of the people here wouldn't consider good. Think about MS Windows. Boy bands. Country music. McDonalds (ok, so they have wireless salads now...).
You didn't even make a single claim as to why you think Google is good. You didn't respond to the poster at all, other than by pointing out how Google IS popular and SHOULD BE even more popular. Wow that makes me want to go out and google so I can be part of the in crowd.
How does this possibly get +4 Insightful? What is the insight???