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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?
It's a cat and mouse game. Google's built a slightly better mouse.
Not remotely a MS fanboi, but at least Bing's trying. If you can build a better mouse, please do. Google's the best game in town.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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.
If I had mod points you would have gotten a "+1 interesting" :P
But that is just me, I mod em how I see em.
...
stop spending them, that'll do (at least it worked for me)
alternatively, you could check your settings and set the relevant option to "I don't want to help" (see the FAQ)
beautiful
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ - google without the ads!
Actually, I'm mostly fine with the speed and typical results I'm getting at the moment. What annoys me the most about searching is when the first several pages of results are full of links to places that require you to have an account before you can access the answer or download the file. If I could define a blacklist that automatically excludes some of the worst offenders from my queries, that would be worth far more to me than shaving a few milliseconds of each search.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
But that's too easy.
signature is pants
Oh, don't mention it Bob and get Dorothy off your lap.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
The least they could do is update the calculator.. I mean, why can't I put in "2 pounds of chocolate in cups" and get an answer? I realize that finding out the density of chocolate may be difficult for Google to do, but why not team up with Wikipedia (have people add things like densities to articles, and then Google can crawl that and use it for calculator results). Or even easier, things that can be found on the periodic table, like "10 kg of lithium in moles" or "atomic weight of calcium".
There seems to be so many things that it could be much more helpful with, and it can't be that hard since it already can answer questions like "What is the mass of the earth times the speed of light squared?", so why can't I ask for the "mass of the earth expressed as energy" (or possible "mass of the earth in joules")?
I guess it's probably just that Google doesn't get many ad clicks when people ask the calculator questions :(
I entered "search engine" on the old infrastructure as well as the new. On the old engine, two of the hits on the first page were for bing.com and msn.com. On Google's new infrastructure neither of those sites shows up on the first page.
Maybe they are taking a page out of Microsoft's book?
two words :
Exalead
Yauba
Exalead is more powerful, and Yauba is a little less effective for specific search like "gentoo bug kernel 2.6.30 fglrx", but guarantees 100% anon, and is pretty powerful and useful in some cases.
Google is not the better search engine on the web, their new engine is very good, but google itself hasn't envolve since... I don't know, it's always the same, and we barely see new features added. (take a look at exdalead labs).
After testing several search engines, it appears that google is not the one with the best ideas, and that pertinence and engines of others like exalead aren't bad enough to consider them inferior to google. Google is the most known, and others well known like bing are not as powerful as those two less-known search engines.
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.
Turns out I'm much more relevant according to the new search than in the older one.
I have a long name (first name + 3 names). Previously, I would need to include at least my first name and two other names so I would be the first result. Now, a search for first name + second name already shows me at the top (even though there was a famous soccer player in Brazil, before I was born, with the same name).
So, it is more relevant *for me*, but it's likely anyone who's isn't related to software development, would be searching for that soccer player and not me.
Either way, the results do seem more relevant overall (or at least more "modern"). And also it *feels* so much faster. I wonder if this is just because not many people are using it yet, when compared to the main site.
I don't know about anyone else, but I used to get much more search-contextual information on fringe information from Google, even when compared to a highly-tailored search. I don't know if Google does its indexing differently now, or if it's indexing/crawling different subsets of data, but the results are not only different, but often less useful in an academic/info-junkie sense.
For instance, searing for "hammurabi" now results in Wikipedia being the first link. This is true for most searches where there's a wiki page, and for many where the search phrase is simply mentioned in the wp page (yet there is no individual wp page for the topic). A lot of the sites I've got bookmarked when researching superstitions and myth surrounding his code (giants, atlantis, etc.) which are still present do not show up in the search results today - but did around 2003.
Likewise, search for anything which might have current cultural significance ('bush war crimes') and then compare it to something that had cultural significance just a couple years ago ('saddam war crimes'). The results are drastically different and (in the case of the former) cater to lazy people; they also make actually finding a -site- (as opposed to just a 'current event' article) on the topic somewhat more frustrating. (This is just an example, though there are plenty of other similar situations - forgive my 3am brain.)
Now, it might be that Google has actually gotten a lot better at returning pertinent results: so good that those little things I see and go "ohhh interesting! *click*" don't occur nearly as often, and as an info junkie, I view google as having degraded.
Who knows. Still head over heels better than Bing or anything else out there, as far as I'm concerned. I'm glad more progress on 'searching better' is being made. I just wish they'd not clog the works making -cultural- assumptions about what I'm after and stick to the semantics of my search phrases.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If you don't want to use them, I can do that for you. For some reason, I seem to never get mod points. So... Please PM me your password.
-Yours, Anonymous " Coward
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!
I found and started playing around with iseek for my Master's classes and have been impressed with the results. Being able to ask questions using natural language is really helpful when I'm not sure exactly for what terms I'd be searching when I first start looking for answers.
Bark less. Wag more.
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.
I'll look.
I used Yahoo because for a while they did have a couple nice privacy public announcements. I tried Ask, but that feels a little clunky for some uses.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
1. From what I have seen, improved results are not coming from a different algorithm, but from an improved indexing. Long tail keyword searches are more likely to be influenced in these cases (where sites that rank might also be on the verge of falling through the cracks of Google's new indexing patterns)
2. From my experience, there appears to be a marked improvement in speed.
3. Don't under estimate the power of the Top 10. One thing that Google does very well is it only rarely screws with a simple top 10 list of the most relevant pages. Innovation in the search results GUI has rarely yielded success (Ask.com for example)
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
Thanks for the tip. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, sadly I don't.
However, a tip of the hat for "Exalead", it looks like a nice search engine. A little graphic-heavy, but I searched for something and it started giving me subcategories of the search based on the contents of the page. That was surprisingly slick.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I doubt it has anything to do with ad revenue. There are too many possible variables for this type of search to be useful.
Chocolate in what form? chips? a solid brick? syrup? cocoa powder? melted?
Two lbs of sawdust in cups. What type of wood? Birch? Poplar? Maple? Walnut? Sawdust from a chainsaw or a table saw?
You have got to be kidding me. What next? Two lbs of filing cabinets in gallons?
sig.ma caters to a different need than google, if a i google something i want links not info, i will then read about my chosen topic on a page dedicated to it!
sure google could announce semantic.google.com which caters to what you want but it should never replace google's primary search!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I wouldn't be so synical "i'm feeling lucky" and mozilla browser bar queries, both cost google in ad clicks but google provide them anyway, I would guess its because google isn't meant to be a caluclator and they included an advnaced version of units but its not that important to them. Getting into human language searches simply isn't worth it/a good idea, people should learn to search (learning to search should be/ is easy) a computer guessing what you meant to ask will never be as good as just asking the right question in the first place!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
Use http://www.scroogle.org/ if you like Google results but don't want to feed the evil empire. There's even an SSL search plugin for it.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Again, with this approach you have to trust some invisible code running on a foreign machine.
I wonder if the new search engine will crawl this page appropriately to get the feedback they're after ;)
I stopped reading after seeing "2 ... cups", that +5 Interesting isn't enough to risk my eyes.
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
Because every type of chocolate in the world is uniformly dense. Mmhm. Right.
It may be that youre expecting too much-- I dont think the average person even with access to density data could answer that question: are they chocolate chips (less density / more airspace)? What % cocoa? Melted? Solid? Powder? Is it white chocolate? I would rather that google give me exact, correct conversions when it can, than to guess in situations where it doesnt have the info it needs and leave me with worse-than-no-information.
Try out the timeline view. It's pretty cool.
Then try to input a search query that makes the timeline go back further than 4500BC.
You can't do it, can you?
We reason thusly:
1. Google knows everything.
2. Google says nothing happened before 4500BC, which is very close to the date calculated for creation in the Bible.
3. Therefore, the universe must have been created by God about 6000 years ago.
QED.
(Did I do better or worse than an ID troll?)
Again, with accessing the internet in general you have to trust invisible code running on a foreign machine. And if you disagree, just tell me your ISP. I guaruntee you they have all sorts of invisible code.
Take off the tin-foil hat and climb out of the steel box, please.
There called scales dude. Though, I'd go digital. Those key ring ones are a joke for your "chocolate".
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
I think you have a point but for some topics the difference in how google ranks results work out worse. For example there are about a dozen sites all archiving as many guitar tabs as possible and any search for guitar tabs will bring up those sites. However, those tab collections are mostly mirroring tabs posted on usenet groups, they don't contain any original information and the tabs are generally of low quality.
Then there are people who write high quality, detailed tabs that they publish in their own small tab collections. On butt ugly pages hosted on geocities with irrelevant gif animations and the whole early 90:s style kit. It is impossible to find those pages these days because all the big sites are much better adapted for seo so the only way to find them is to stumble on them by pure chance.
Football Odds
Stupid wikipedia link is stuck at #1 and has been forever. And it's not because more sites link there (nobody does) or it's the best site to read on the topic (see if you can spot the errors! bonus points if you can spot the times I corrected an error only to have it reverted.) Government website is highly clicked on & linked to, but is actually rather not useful at all. It's crap, actually, and lots of the important info hasn't been updated since 2006. But I suppose Google looks at the domain name and gives it bonus mushroom levels if it matches some developer's idea of what should come first.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
My head is fine without any tinfoil, thank you. I have much personal information on google and don't care much about anonymity. I often use my real name on the Internet (maybe even here someday).
But I know that difference of using a site that says "I promise you anonymity" and Tor.
My friends it all about money thru advertising.Google wins and we lose.
I'm been trying out Bing for the past month and prefer their results. I have to wonder if Google timed this new update because of the focus Bing is getting? Google thrives on media attention and this release puts the webmaster focus back on them.
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Google results are not as clean and relevant as they once were...some result pages show video, news (plus it's irrelevant news most of the time), and some domains have sub domain search results. What happened to clean page results?
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Also one of the main reasons I'm switching to Bing is because Google always pushes local results. I'm living in Costa Rica and have no interest in local spanish search results (yes when I type in English in Google some/half of the results come back in Spanish). For 90% of my searches I am after authority world results...not crappy local Costa Rica results. I would like to set my search results to Google International but can not (yes I can type 'Google.com international' in the search bar but why can't I permanently set my Google page to international?. Does anyone know if this is possible?
New View Media - Custom Website Design
The least they could do is update the calculator.. I mean, why can't I put in "2 pounds of chocolate in cups" and get an answer?
Because it's a stupid question. Is that liquid chocolate? Dry, shaved chocolate? And what type? Dark chocolate? Milk chocolate?
Here, I have a better solution for you: Get a kitchen scale. Seriously, it's a virtually required tool for any serious home cook. A decent one will only set you back $50 or so, and I guarantee will be worth every penny.
Take a look at True#. Granted, it would be nice to have all this functionality as part of the same engine we use to search the web, but at least someone's doing it.
"10 kg of lithium in moles"
I didn't know moles could be bipolar...
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
I didn't have time to wait around for Google to fix its system, so I had no choice but to play in the field that they created.
Now my site is back up to #4 on Google Caffeine. Perhaps someone from Google read this and fixed something.
Being as Bing is the first search engine to even laughably compare to Google in any way, shape, or form, more to the point I was trying to be thankful for the competition Bing brought that started the clockwork of getting Google's search algorithm fixed. It's nice to see Microsoft in a market where they actually have to compete as opposed to flex their monopoly muscle is what I was trying to say.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"
Well with chocolate I would assume we're packing the volume of a cup with 100% pure chocolate (no air).
Wow.. that's actually exactly what I was looking for. I suddenly understand why Wolfram Alpha is useful.
"2 lbs of chocolate in cups" is actually a really hard question to answer; it's also a reason why recipes in the US make no sense. The cup is a unit of volume; 1 cup of water makes sense. One cup of molten chocolate might make sense, too. Recipes in the US tend to use cups as a measurement of a solid - for flour, chocolate chips, nuts, etc. Depending upon the size and consistency of your solid, the amount that fits in a cup will vary! A weight is much more sensible for measuring solids - 2 pounds of chocolate weighs (close enough to) two pounds, whether it's bars, chips, squares, liquid, etc. Same for nuts, and even flour (which can vary greatly in volume depending upon air content, how it's packed, and so on).
(The rule of thumb that 1lb = 2 cups works great for most recipes, but it's only even somewhat accurate for items whose density closely resembles water)
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
MODS: really? This is quite informative and not even close to a troll. Unless experts-exchange is marking this as a troll. Stupid moderators.
br/
--
yes I am
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
"Stop spending them" doesn't work for me. I still get 15 every week or two. Of course, I never find anything to use them on until the day after they expire.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Then what you're doing is tantamount to playing football on a baseball field. The purpose of Google's main search engine is not to rank businesses or serve as yellow pages (although you can pay for placement within results that appear at the top of the page and are clearly marked as being paid for). Yahoo's yellow pages, BBBonline and Angie's List are more appropriate indexes/venues for your business's publicity.
I realize that most people probably stop by Google first when looking for a plumber, computer repair, etc., but as you point out that strategy is sub-optimal for them and for you, as it's more akin to asking their friends and neighbors about something than it is to looking in the yellow pages. Between the customers ignorant of all the online resources available to them, and SEOs gaming search results forcing Google to approximate something it's not designed for, can you really ever expect a satisfactory outcome for any party involved?
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
comparegoogle.com has been helpful in finding difference in search results for the two algorithms. Just put in some keywords and see what changed. Could be helpful for SEO engineers.
I put "atomic weight of calcium" into google and it responded correctly.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/#hl=en&q=atomic+weight+of+calcium&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1&fp=NH-w64u7d1c
Gives (above the rest of the results):
"Calcium â" Atomic Mass: 40.078(4)
According to http://www.chemnetbase.com/periodic_table/elements/calcium.htm - More sources Â"
I've never gotten mod points because I dared to reply to "The Post."
Two lbs of filing cabinets in gallons?
Um.. Cinnamon! Louis and Clark! ... ??? ... 42!
Can I buy a vowell? D:
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Once upon a time, editing and typesetting were different things. Now, we combine them and call it wordprocessing. Things are quite often better when combined. Especially in rapidly evolving industries, when two generations of technology for the same purpose** overlap.
** full text indexing/searching and indexing/searching the semantic web are both for finding information on websites