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.)
Man! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Man! (Score:3, Funny)
Those are two words that, taken as a phrase, boggle my mind. Let's talk about weird mental images...
Re:Man! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Man! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Man! (Score:3, Funny)
I need a new motorcycle candle. The old just keeps blowing out.
KFG
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!
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.
It's obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's obvious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's obvious (Score:3, Funny)
Deja vu? (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me... (Score:2)
The company I was with at the time must have lost a few hundred man hours of productivity to THAT little fad.
Xentax
Re:This reminds me... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This reminds me... (Score:2)
Hmm...but have you posted one on Slashdot before?
Xentax
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
Candle Truck? Speaker bracelet?!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:Candle Truck? Speaker bracelet?!?! (Score:3, Funny)
Unfortunately, what came back [google.com] was a bunch of pages advertising hotels with golf courses in Lima, Peru. So that technique doesn't work all the time.
Bug? (Score:2)
If this is as widepsread as it seems to be, then it could be pretty bad. Testing for bugs is always difficult (and a pain), but I'm sure that testing new releases of the google search engine is very hard, especially for peculiar issues like this one.
Anyway, that's my 5 centimes.
Maan
Re:Bug? (Score:2, Interesting)
-dk
Corporate entity (Score:3, Interesting)
I propose an opensource web based search engine... No more weirdness, no more screwups, no more censorship!
That's nice and all but the code isn't the problem (Score:2)
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:Corporate entity (Score:2)
I know you were joking but my mind took me on a flight of fancy on how an opensource search engine would work.
I'm thinking the only way you could do it economically (i.e. for free) would be to leverage a distributed computing client... use that p2p network that distributes documents throughout the network... and basically each document is an index for a particular word... use a random aggregate-avoiding algorithm to generate new indices, and run it on eve
Re:Corporate entity (Score:3)
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.
Google Zeitgeist (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google Zeitgeist (Score:5, Funny)
No longer will we
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
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!"
The same words in quotes show more hits ... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the hits (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer not to even click on that one, and just speculate.
maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:maybe (Score:5, Funny)
groups/deja is also acting up (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps being on the top is getting to their CPU's
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.
Re:groups/deja is also acting up (Score:5, Informative)
Searches no one would try (Score:2, Funny)
"As soon as I shove this hot poker..."
Google Whackiness (Score:5, 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 t
Re:Google Whackiness (Score:3, Insightful)
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]
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:Gator and Zuvio (Score:3, Interesting)
My results for "candle truck" (completely genuine) (Score:2)
back up the candle truck
The hardware store was forced to borrow a Colonial Candle truck
Not wanting to kill anybody, we wait until
the last two guys wander up to the candle truck.
scented candle truck accessories
yankee candle truck part
Re:My results for "candle truck" (completely genui (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Re:Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:2)
What does the recently created verb "to google" mean? It typically implies to "grep the web", not "dc on the web"
So if you REALLY NEED to use google calc to do that, add 100 + 23 + 867 + 5309
Also, I mean, come on! You are asking for JEnny's phone number! [snopes.com] (which, I got off the wall).
Re:Another thing - what triggers the calculator? (Score:3, Funny)
What's wrong with this picture? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what I'm seeing...
http://www.sminkybang.com/google.png [sminkybang.com]
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?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.
Re:What's wrong with this picture? (Score:3, Funny)
On Google buying Kaltix (Score:3, Interesting)
Searched for truck candle (Score:2)
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
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.
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: (Score:2)
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.
Simple. (Score:5, Funny)
speakerbracelet.com (Score:3, Funny)
1. Register speakerbracelet.com
2. Be the top 1 of 2 search results on google.
3. ????
4. Profit!
The real time search monitor (Score:5, Funny)
They have to be pretty confused right now, when thousands of searches for speaker bracelets, motorcycle candles and candle trucks show up on the display!
Re:The real time search monitor (Score:3, Interesting)
stone dog quote (Score:3, Interesting)
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:speaker bracelet two (Score:5, Funny)
fiat candle truck: Results 1 - 10 of about 5,200
audi candle truck: Results 1 - 10 of about 7,090
chrysler candle truck: Results 1 - 10 of about 18,400
ferrari candle truck: Results 1 - 10 of about 9,810
ford candle truck: Your search - ford candle truck - did not match any documents.
Looks like it's about time ford got on the candle truck bandwagon.
Is it a glitch? (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Pending purchase? (Score:3, Funny)
Another example (Score:3, Informative)
Who cares about searching for that. (Score:3, Funny)
Candle Truck? (Score:5, Funny)
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
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.
The *REAL* answer (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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.
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.
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:I for one am outraged at google! (Score:2)
strange thing is that it's not even real words...
[for the humor impaired I know what german looks like....]
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
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'
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: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 ranki
"to be or not to be"... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"to be or not to be"... (Score:5, Funny)
ducks
Re:"to be or not to be"... (Score:3, Funny)
2*b || !(2*b) is actually a tautology :P
According to Google, "2*b || !(2*b)" is most likely a generalized incomplete beta function
(As seen on Wolfram's functions [wolfram.com]
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:2)
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:5, Funny)
Um, yeah. Actually, I don't know what you're talking about. Entering the phrase "to be or not to be" -- with quotes, so as to indicate you want the phrase, not just the collection of words -- yielded the first two pages of results all having that phrase. Not all of them were for pages on Shakespeare, but then again, that phrase is now deeply buried in the common memespace. If you make the search phrase
you do indeed get results with the phrase and exclusively referring to Shakespeare. Oh, I get it. You don't like the idea you need to actually construct a reasonable search phrase. You're mad that Google isn't, I don't know, telepathic. Your best bet is the SFWIWNFWIS search engine -- search for what I want, not for what I say.
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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
Re:It still can't do phrase searches (Score:3, Funny)
Ironic, considering that it would suck if you could...
Re:What's wacky with Slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 :)