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.)
maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
COMMON searches? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Hello? You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google Whackiness (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe unrelated but (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps some of google's anti-spamming countermeasures have backfired?
Maybe they're tweaking (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
That makes Google look good (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Canuck Ok (Score:2, Insightful)
216.239.37.99 www.google.ca google.ca
in your hosts file. (I can't test this from work, though).
HTML source (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hello? You're kidding, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
The good old days really weren't so bad. It is true that a single search [google.com] [not child or office safe] did not return such instant gratification, but there was only a briefly a time when one had to search several engines. First there was Yahoo, then Altavista, then, for many of us, Sherlock which did the searching and collating for us. Soon after google became good enough.
And I have had to trawl through many a useless links on Google to get to what I need. And i am not new to the web or web searching. Nor am I new to the art of index searching in general, having spent more time than i care to remember in the stacks.
Google is very good. But remember one of the reasons many of us started using it was the ad free pages, not the quality. The quality came later. As did the ads.
The structural force on the web exerted by google is of concern. It would be nice if another service came on line. Perhaps one that had the original focus of google. It would be a stress for spammers because they would have to manipulate thier pages for two services, but I think we could forgive them that problem.
Maybe it isn't a problem! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Concurrance (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The same words in quotes show more hits ... (Score:1, Insightful)
And if I search on google.com for candle truck filetype:pdf, I als get many more results.
Obviously
- it has to do something with the English search index.
- if I limit my search (by filteype:xxx or language or -XXXX) I get more results.
Could it be that there are some corrupted entries in Google's index which cause the search to abort, returning only the results it found before getting to the corrupted entry.
If i limit my search, google won't get to those corrupted entries (or much later), thus returning more results. Just guessing.
Re:Corporate entity (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, you know what make google so great? Part of it's the interface. Part of it's the software. But most of it is the company. The clout to afford enough bandwidth to spider the earth on a routine basis. The cash to maintain thousands of servers and a complicated database with which to serve not only their engine, but a CACHE of pretty much everything they index.
No open source project will ever have the ability to do these things. Because the people who are good enough salesmen to get the revenue needed to do what google does won't want to dillute their position by allowing any hacker with a gimpbox to run the same engine. And the people who are good enough open source software designers to write an engine like google wouldn't want some ad guy treating their work like it was inktomi. You can't run a search engine without money, and you can't run an OSS project like a truly commercial enterprise.
At the end of the day, distributed software doesn't lend itself well to large, FAST, searchable databases. And if this is -1, Flamebait, I guess you may flame away.
Re:Bug? Yes bug. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Unhelpful FAQs (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
popular == good? (Score:3, Insightful)
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???