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Google Previews New Search Infrastructure
Google has announced a "developer preview" of a new search infrastructure, though one wouldn't have to be a developer to try it out. Google is asking for feedback on how the search results in the new regime stack up against the old. Matt Cutts has posted a mini FAQ. Some early testing indicates that the new search may be faster in some cases, and return more relevant results, than the old one. Those who attempt to game Google search for a living will be scrambling henceforth. Has anyone identified the new crawler bot in log files?
Yeah, I kinda feel you there. I'm kind of itching for some real leap in progress; I think it's due. Semantic queries ala wolfram alpha (well, not LIKE wolfram alpha, but what wolfram is trying to do) are where I'd expect things to go. Seems like the old guard are running out of ideas.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Why would there be a new crawler?? How many more copies of the Interwebs does Google need?
G.
The more relevant results may be just because the algorithm is new, so the SEOs couldn't yet optimize for it. If it really gives more relevant results will be seen after it is the main search algorithm for some time.
Remember, in the beginning the old algorithm used to be very good in finding relevant results.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Since when is "putting cruft on search results page so that it is barely usable" and "not implementing sessions and cookies" evolution? Google won because it was nice and clean compared to altavista and yahoo.
I see that name searches for unimportant people (like myself) don't put the Facebook, Netlog, Myspace, ... results on top anymore.
Progress!
You seem to equate "features" with quality of the search engine.
Some value
- speed
- a clean interface and
- relevance of the search results (which can be improved by analyzing my previous searches)
If you want to surf the web anonymously, use TOR. Trusting the site saying "we don't have server logs, PROMISE" is silly.
The real problem is that the web is ever-expanding in it's multimedia capabilities... and our ability to index such media is falling woefully behind. We don't have any magic software to scan through a video, identifying objects, and sorting out major themes to tag it with... that's left to the folks who upload them. The same could be said for pictures and audio... and even, in some cases, text. How many times have you been searching for some form or other that some company keeps a PDF of that is a scanned image from a hard copy (so that the text is not search-able)?
More hard research needs to be done into automatically creating indexing terms for all of the various media out there. Once this starts to happen, we have a chance (albeit small) of taming the web.
This is going to mess up the content spinners and the paragraph swappers who are trying to either attract ads or build a link farm. Those who have well-build, informative, content-rich pages can sit back and watch the fun.
"Content Spinning" explained, kinda sorta
Conversely, if a search result goes from #44 to #4 simply because someone paid some SEO firm to make that happen, the search results should state so explicitly. When you pay for SEO you're feeding a disease that renders the search algorithms increasingly ineffective. Gaming a public resource is selfish, and with this "reset" by Google you're witnessing how your actions can come back to hurt you in the long run.
Please explain how paid gaming of the system is objective.
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison