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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.
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)
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
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 :(
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.