What's Wacky with Google? 619
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.)
Re:This reminds me... (Score:2, Informative)
Google Whackiness (Score:5, Informative)
Re:groups/deja is also acting up (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:5, Informative)
For example, I searched for "to be or not to be" phrase origin [google.com], and got what I consider to be useful results.
YMMV, of course.
Xentax
At the risk of making you look bad.... (Score:1, Informative)
Links 8 and 10 in the results might be useful, but they do not contain the exact phrase I was searching for.
Re:Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google Whackiness (Score:3, Informative)
The link farms do get caught, I know a local company that got their own and several customers sites banned for everything except the specific names of the companies. Sometimes it takes a while, so if you see something that you think is a link farm, mail them about it or post it in the relevent Google newsgroup, apparently they do check them and it helps them find people who are using nefarious means to get a high ranking.
Re:What's wacky with Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
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 :)
Re:This reminds me... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:What's wacky with slashdot? (Score:2, Informative)
I explained here [slashdot.org].
speaker bracelet two (Score:5, Informative)
Weird. Very weird. Adding another word to a search should narrow down the result set, not widen it.
Try [google.com] it.
Re:What's wrong with this picture? (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting...
my third result is Digital Video [adobe.com], which doesn't have "google" in it at all...
Could it be? Google is not perfect? Or are they exerting subtle mind-control techniques?Re:Canuck Ok (Score:5, Informative)
216.239.37.99 www.google.com
In your hosts file to force it to resolve to the US google, or just type that in your browser.
Alternately you can search google for the other googles and connect to them through google, for google japan, google australia, or google canada for example - or you can just hit the go to google.com link at the bottom of the google.ca page which links to http://www.google.com/ncr which I guess disables the country recognition and could be used as a bookmark as an alternative to modifying the hosts file.
Re:groups/deja is also acting up (Score:5, Informative)
Another example (Score:3, Informative)
Re:COMMON searches? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Google Whackiness (Score:5, Informative)
For example when searching for visual basic decompiler [google.com] the second to fourth results are 'spam sites'.
I always report this kind of crap via the "Dissatisfied with your search results?"-link, but apparently nothing is done against this sites, which are getting more and more annoying.
Time to switch? [teoma.com]
Re:Man! (Score:3, Informative)
The results reported in this story are really bad, though - never seen anything like it myself! I'd have to guess that they're tweaking their algorithm and it's not handling some of the cases properly. No time to RTFA - gotta go!
It's for novice users (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Something I've noticed recently... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're looking for the product "VB.NET", you need to search for it as a term.
Re:Something I've noticed recently... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Another Quandry: The + Operator (Score:2, Informative)
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 [google.com] and one +for another [google.com] 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?
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:4, Informative)
Not a week . . . (Score:3, Informative)
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