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.)
It still can't do phrase searches (Score:1, Interesting)
"to be or not to be" produces a 20% error rate on the first page of hits.
Someone told me that this is OK, since Google is producing pages that are linked FROM pages containing "to be or not to be", instead of pages actually containing the phrase. What a cockamamy way to run a search engine. Altavista, a thing of the past, had its problems, but at least it could do phrase searches accurately.
I also keep getting searches where Google tells me that it could not be bothered to produce correct results, so it excluded certain words from the sentence, and I have to try again with a + in front of the words. Well, Google, I wanted those words in the first place, which is why I included them in the phrase.
Is 100% accurate matching results to a phrase search too much to ask for a search engine?
Candle Truck? Speaker bracelet?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Corporate entity (Score:3, Interesting)
I propose an opensource web based search engine... No more weirdness, no more screwups, no more censorship!
The same words in quotes show more hits ... (Score:5, Interesting)
groups/deja is also acting up (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps being on the top is getting to their CPU's
Re:Bug? (Score:2, Interesting)
-dk
Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:5, Interesting)
All sorts of odd things will both pull up an answer from google's calculator and also do a search - for example, searching for avogadros number [google.com] or hbar [google.com].
So why do searches that might fit US telephone conventions not trigger calculator? Is it because some design decision makes it impossible to trigger both calculator and their phone lookup service. (Yes kids, google is a reverse phone directory, albeit with old data)
What's wrong with this picture? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what I'm seeing...
http://www.sminkybang.com/google.png [sminkybang.com]
On Google buying Kaltix (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's wacky with Slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Canuck Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish I could compare to google.com, but for the past year or so, google.com automatically forwards all canadian IP's to google.ca
Google Sellout? (Score:2, Interesting)
What's wacky with slashdot? (Score:3, Interesting)
"The order of words matters also, with motorcycle candle revealing different results to candle motorcycle."
"Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's"
and one without.
Complete text of the two versions are:
"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 several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet are affected. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Have fun looking for patterns but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
and
"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 several weeks at least, 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."
Strange.
Re:That's nice and all but the code isn't the prob (Score:3, Interesting)
Since by its nature search engine is not a transactional application, it can be effectively broken into thousands and thousands of semi independent pieces (just like real Google works now).
Anyone aware of Distributed Open Source Powered-by-people search engine project?
Re:groups/deja is also acting up (Score:5, Interesting)
Another oddity has been that threads have been stated as having "1 post", but viewing the thread shows a larger thread.
stone dog quote (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:At the risk of making you look bad.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, and one detail about your original post: The bit about which pages are shown is a little backwards. Google ranks pages with your search on it based on how many other pages out there link to the candidate page (regardless of their content, or at least without specific respect to whether or not those pages contain the search terms). I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's the short version.
So, if you're searching for "Xentax", your top results will be pages with Xentax, which are heavily linked to from other indexed pages. It's good for finding *popular* pages relating to a search, moreso than finding obscure webpages (by design).
Xentax
Re:Canuck Ok (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, I used to find the automatic redirect to google.ca annoying, but you can get around that by going to www.google.com/ncr [google.com]. It will bring you to the original google.com site, with an optional link to go to Google Canada.
Re:Candle Truck? Speaker bracelet?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
(watch for word wrap)
#!/bin/sh
#
dl=`wc -l
RND=`date '+%H%S%d%M'`
RND1=`date '+%y%S'`
RND=`expr $RND + $RND1`
bilge=`expr $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND + $RND`
dw1=`expr $RND % $dl`
dw2=`expr $bilge % $dl`
echo `sed -e ${dw1}p -e ${dw2}p -e d
So far, "pectoral undaunted", "adjudicates battlefield", "numerous quark" and "camouflaged todays" work as expected in google.
Google newsgroup search is also behaving strangely (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Candle Truck? Speaker bracelet?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
... and the crazy users wrote scripts to use the Google engine!
(shameless self plug) Its surprising what sites can appear when querying Google. Try my site [mangle.ca] that queries Google with random words to find random webpages. Its quite powerful and a good timewaster.
General idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
So you can search for one thing, and conceivably the checksum/hashes for each term match those of another page that has nothing to do with it, and it's returned as a relevant match by accident.
This might explain a lot of result sillyness.
Gator and Zuvio (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's Googles somewhat hilarious cache [216.239.37.104] of the Mamufilms.com page. The page includes links for everything from "Peter Paul and Mary mp3" to "preteen bra images". The text is vaguely reminiscent of actual gramatical English. Here's one sentence:
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:2, Interesting)
Click the "cached" link; google will tell you if the page contains the phrase or if its only linked from sites that contain the phrase. Nobody cares, though, 'cause "2BEE or nottoobee" is either exactly what you were looking for, or easily ignored based on the title, summary and domain name.
Remember that google is not trying to be pedantic, its trying to be USEFUL. It's taking your search terms or phrase and returning what it thinks are the pages most likely to satisfy your request. In my opinion, google does this brilliantly.
I still don't know why people bring up historical search engines in comparison to google. Most of the complaints boil down to sour grapes: for the record, I too think it sucks that you can't open the window on the airplane.
Re:GoogleWhack for Eeeevvvillll (Score:2, Interesting)
o_0
Google Q&A (Score:2, Interesting)
modify the search to exclude the single result (Score:1, Interesting)
Yay for broken indexes
Re:The real time search monitor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The exact search (Score:2, Interesting)
So, at minimum, I would accept that there is 90% accuracy in its top 10 results.
That said, I think I (and a lot of other people) disagree with you about what a search engine is. You compare it to a database query, which is sensible, seeing as a search engine is obviously going to depend on a database. However, I think the databse query is merely a process for answering what is, ultimately, not a database question but an ontological one.
When I type "to be or not to be" into Google, I am not merely querying a database for all pages that contain that phrase, and asking them to be listed according to a nebulous page rank. I am asking the far more subtle question "What page am I looking for right now? I'll give you a clue - 'to be or not to be'."
Thinking about the latter question instead of the former may clear up some of your problems.
Re:Gator and Zuvio (Score:3, Interesting)
It can't do matching (Score:1, Interesting)
No, it would be more useful by being as useful as Altavista. Altavista might have fewer results, but they are 100% accurate and thus relevant. Google's bad results are less relevant since I never asked for them. Non-matching results are not relevant unless they are specifically asked for.
"obeornottobe.com is relevent to a search for "to be or not to be"."
No, it is not, since I never wanted it. Sloppy logic is a flaw, not a strength. Sure, if I search on "Bill Clinton", you might similarly argue that "Al Gore" is "Relevant" and thus pollute the results with Gore results that never mention Clinton...
More Inane Search Engine Tricks (Score:2, Interesting)
Google AltaVista Lycos Yahoo
Google 93,000,000 5,817,435 22,483,511 24,300,000
AltaVista 2,050,000 1,821,362 9,179,642 3,090,000
Lycos 18,500,000 2,309,191 11,215,263 6,950,000
Yahoo 95,300,000 10,284,666 55,680,102 38,400,000
e.g. Lycos found 22,483,511 pages mentioning Google, while only about half that many mention itself (Lycos). Perhaps this leads to poor search engine self-esteem issues.
Further exercises in pointless database introversion are left to the reader.
Real information (Score:5, Interesting)
She didn't say if the problem was that the cleaning agent was clogging searches or if any logged junk pages had been blocked. If so maybe the agent is flawed. In any case, they've stopped using it for the time being.
Easy work around (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:COMMON searches? (Score:1, Interesting)
These may be obscure searches because you don't use them, but google is still broken. As a programmer, you've got to take these warning signs seriously because these problems will creep into "common" searches and then people will definitely notice.
Think about security groups that look for vulnirabilities in software. They must use uncommon techniques to do this, and very frequently the results are suprising. Software like this (google) must be predictable with common and uncommon use, otherwise something is broken.
Strange counts for five weeks now (Score:5, Interesting)
Webmasters who have various directories and know exactly how many pages are in each directory, began noticing five weeks ago that Google was reporting approximately twice the number of pages in each directory than have ever existed in that directory. Prior to five weeks ago, Google used to be fairly close to the actual number (assuming that you get a full crawl).
GoogleWatch speculates on the reason why Google has been behaving strangely ever since it stopped doing the traditional deep crawl once per month. The last standard deep crawl was in April but it wasn't used -- Google threw out this data (by their own admission) and reverted to earlier data. The speculative piece [google-watch.org] was written last June.
Since it was written, Google has started showing "supplemental results" on many searches. It looks like they are running a parallel index. Why would they do this? All the problems Google has been having, along with the supplemental index, seem to support GoogleWatch's theory.
Strange results for duplicate search terms (Score:3, Interesting)
candle truck
1-1 of about 101,000
candle candle truck truck
1-1 of about 82,200
candle candle candle truck truck truck
1-1 of about 73,700
candle candle candle candle truck truck truck truck
1-1 of about 68,600
Another interesting one is
candle candle truck
1-2 of about 89,200
Re:Google Zeitgeist (Score:3, Interesting)
Who are you kidding? There're probably a dozen google-gurus laughing at this thread as we speak.
"Hey, guys, you know that bit of code we wrote to screw up the google whackers? Slashdot finally took notice!"
Re:Strange counts for five weeks now (Score:3, Interesting)
Aside from that your piece is interesting, but it does come across as a bit inflamatory. Just present your facts and conclusions and forget about the conspiracy theories and sarcasm. You'll have a lot more success convincing people if you don't appear to have an axe to grind.