6 ms·

Google announces 50 search changes implemented in March

87 points by byrneseyeview 14y ago

freeman478 14y ago
With all the bashing around them stagnating in search, it's nice to see that they are continuously improving even if it's more incremental than revolutionnary. I particularily like the indexing of symbols, it will make searching for C# results easier.
- marshray 14y ago
  Huh, DDG seems to index C# correctly but not C++. Maybe it has something to do with its search results coming from Microsoft.
  - shawabawa 14y ago
    My guess is that + is a search operator.
sjmulder 14y ago
“Less aggressive synonyms” Fantastic! That’s one of the things that has been bothering me on Google lately.
- nostromo 14y ago
  The one that's been driving me crazy lately: 4 as a synonym for "for." I understand some percent of the population "rites lik dis 4 serch" -- but I certainly don't! When 4 = for, and "for" is on every page on the internet, it almost had me pulling my hair out. Here's an example (but not my exact query). "iPhone 4" will match pages with "iPhone" and "for." http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png
  - ktsmith 14y ago
    While incredibly annoying putting the 4 in quotes like this: "4" will eliminate "for" from your results.
    - bo1024 14y ago
      I've been wondering. How do I do that and also search for the exact phrase "iPhone 4"? Do I type "iPhone 4" "4"? (edit: this seems to work.)
    - cpeterso 14y ago
      Someone should write a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to automatically quote your Google search terms.
      - vaneck 14y ago
        Not an extension, but: http://finderr.org http://finderr.org Disclaimer: I made that, but I gain nothing from its usage and don't collect any private information (like the search terms).
      - spacemanaki 14y ago
        I discovered the "verbatim" option under the "More search tools" link on the left hand side recently. http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=g_verb&answer=1734130 http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... It's not as convenient as an extension or a script, of course.
        sp332 14y ago
        It should be easy enough to write an extension or even a bookmarklet for this. You just have to add &tbs=li:1 to the end of the URL to enable "verbatim" mode.
      - Drbble 14y ago
        I have one such extension on my PC (but I am on my phone now, sorry. )
- Anechoic 14y ago
  “Less aggressive synonyms” For the love of god, yes. I just did a search where Google conveniently decided to substitute "bike" and "bicycle" for the word "cycle" (as in "a series of repeated events") Sigh.
ecesena 14y ago
Autocomplete math... looking forward ;)
joshuahedlund 14y ago
> Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "Abacus", project codename "Freshness"] We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries. > More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users. Hopefully this means fewer instances of searching for code help and seeing prominent results from 2005.
- wickedchicken 14y ago
  left side, 'show search tools' -> 'past year'.
  - masonhensley 14y ago
    Ya, but that's still too much of a pain. 2 clicks.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    You often still get results dated last week for pages that clearly state a byline years in the past.
Turing_Machine 14y ago
A very brief test indicates that search strings containing "Cocoa Webview" no longer return a bunch of useless crap* about Android webviews with the word "Cocoa" nowhere to be seen on the page. If that's the case: it's about time. *"Useless crap" is context-sensitive, of course -- no disrespect toward Android intended, but I go to the trouble of including "Cocoa" in my search Google shouldn't be giving me pages that don't even contain that word. It might be different if it were smart enough to just give you Objective C or iOS-focused pages that included "Webview", but not Cocoa, since there's at least some probability that those pages would be of interest. However, it wasn't that smart.
jskopek 14y ago
The new additions of UEFA, KHL, and tennis scores would seem to indicate that each snippet type is manually built and added by Google. I would have expected something a little bit broader; an algorithm that attempts to automatically parse score results for all major sports based on the pages they pull results from, or something to that effect. The former is way easier, and probably a whole lot more accurate, that the later, but it removes a little bit of the sex from the whole process. It also highlights how much work must be involved in building the snippet generators for a site like google.
- pgrote 14y ago
  Last year, there was an announcement Google and ESPN were starting to use micro data. http://frontrow.espn.go.com/2011/08/espn-google-and-microdata/ http://frontrow.espn.go.com/2011/08/espn-google-and-microdat... ESPN indicated they worked with Google for baseball, but maybe they completed the work for all sports: "Going forward our team is planning to create microdata-enhanced results for other sports like football, basketball, hockey, and soccer."
- sherwin 14y ago
  Well they do have snippets for certain facts: e.g. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tom+cruise+age http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... which is almost certainly a broader algorithm that tries to semantically parse out factual information.
epoxyhockey 14y ago
News from the boiler room in March: - Spinners hit hard - Text link sellers hit hard :)
- pgrote 14y ago
  What are spinners?
  - epoxyhockey 14y ago
    Please explain article rewriting. EDIT: That was my #fail at answering the question with spun text. Duskwuff did it well!
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Tools and systems that take a corpus of root text and create large number of variations of that content, to avoid duplicate content penalties when trying to stuff sites to catch Google's attention.
    - duskwuff 14y ago
      Or, as a a "spinning" script might reword it: > Implements and setups that take a corpus of tuber text and create meaty number of changes of that tranquil, to avoid duplicate content sanctions when trying to stuff localities to catch Google's contemplation.
    - emmelaich 14y ago
      Like serkey.com? God I hate that site; it came up with most of the front page for pretty much every Oracle related query lately. That it until these changes, apparently. Well done Google!
macrael 14y ago
Click through to the video of their search meeting. It seems really strange to me that something like that would be made public. I mean, it is pretty content free, but why spend so much effort to show the world deliberations on how to change search?
- jaredmck 14y ago
  Because it gives a sense of transparency to the process, when in reality google is far from transparent. If they made a big deal about how no one could see the meetings behind the curtain, the secret mystique might erode some of google's goodwill in the eyes of the public - especially if the us govt got involved. Most people, if they don't have a strong interest in tech & the Internet, only see the surface PR efforts, without having the background to notice that they're in fact heavily orchestrated PR. The strategy certainly seems to be working thus far - but I feel they might be pushing it a bit recently. More people seem to be noticing and thinking about it. Take a look at when google chooses to release news, especially "fun" news like robotic cars. They are great at the art of PR - which is not really a surprise if you own a tinfoil hat, because you never know - maybe they can get leading indicators through query & behavior mining across their dataset? :)
- gojomo 14y ago
  I find it amazing that there are 30-something people in the room & 9+ more by video. Some are almost certainly checking their email or doing other things – despite the small text insert that tries to suggest they're all looking at advanced analytics about the proposed changes. Very few speak or seem to be in a physical (or status) position where they could speak, though maybe as the topic changes, some of the giant peanut gallery gets engaged. Altogether, it fits a lot of meeting antipatterns. When I see perplexing things like this about Google, I have to wonder: is this a counterintuitive part of the secret sauce, or an indulgence whose cost is covered up by their gusher of quasi-monopolistic profits?
  - moultano 14y ago
    That's a weekly meeting where proposed changes are discussed. Most of the people not speaking are there because they have a launch to present. Each one gets a lightning round of deliberation somewhat like the one in the video, a decision is made, and they move on to the next.
Drbble 14y ago
> “dog” may be incorrectly introduced as a synonym for > “cat”. We’ve been working for some time to appropriately > ferret out these brilliant. Also funny that they launched two Synonym features that appear to be be the same feature described in different words.
- obtu 14y ago
  This is a really cool part, those siblings and synonyms are making them build the rudiments of some kind of Watson-like concept net.
zoul 14y ago
Any chances of getting rid of the redirects in search results? It's so annoying that I can't simply copy the result link URL and paste without getting some crazy Google tracking URL instead. It's such an obvious fail that I can't see how it's possible to not have it fixed yesterday, it made me switch to a different search engine.
- arbitrarywords 14y ago
  I've installed a greasemonkey script called "Remove Google Redirection" that seems to work fine...
- re 14y ago
  It also breaks the browser history in Safari, which is really frustrating: http://i.imgur.com/pOQmo.png http://i.imgur.com/pOQmo.png
- espinchi 14y ago
  I don't think we'll get rid of this any time soon. This is rolled out only for a subset of the users [1], and I guess it provides Google with valuable analytics data. [1] As I can read in several articles in the internet, but can't find an authoritative source.
- ivanshih 14y ago
  There is an interesting discussion about this on stackexchange.com. "Turning off Google search results indirection": http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off-google-search-results-indirection http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off...
- ranit8 14y ago
  Noscript has a surrogate that solves this; it works even if scripts are enabled on google search page.
nsns 14y ago
>Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing. ...we’ve now started to index the following heavily used symbols: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. We’ll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants. That, and the new "Verbatim' option, are really good news. There are also some five (10% of the entire list) timely tweaks to synonyms. All in all, it seems Google listens and tries to improve its service, which has become rather paternalistic lately ("you wrote X, but actually mean Y", no I don't!). Well done.
- obtu 14y ago
  I found relevant results for $_, $argv, @memoize, useful completion but no results for $@ and $#, nothing at all for $!. Python programmers rejoice, Perl programmers still mourn code search.
smackfu 14y ago
> More relevant image search results. [launch codename "Lice"] Really? Who picks these codenames?

87 points by byrneseyeview 14y ago

With all the bashing around them stagnating in search, it's nice to see that they are continuously improving even if it's more incremental than revolutionnary. I particularily like the indexing of symbols, it will make searching for C# results easier.

marshray 14y ago
Huh, DDG seems to index C# correctly but not C++. Maybe it has something to do with its search results coming from Microsoft.
- shawabawa 14y ago
  My guess is that + is a search operator.

sjmulder 14y ago

“Less aggressive synonyms” Fantastic! That’s one of the things that has been bothering me on Google lately.

nostromo 14y ago
The one that's been driving me crazy lately: 4 as a synonym for "for." I understand some percent of the population "rites lik dis 4 serch" -- but I certainly don't! When 4 = for, and "for" is on every page on the internet, it almost had me pulling my hair out. Here's an example (but not my exact query). "iPhone 4" will match pages with "iPhone" and "for." http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png http://i.imgur.com/vN1oh.png
- ktsmith 14y ago
  While incredibly annoying putting the 4 in quotes like this: "4" will eliminate "for" from your results.
  - bo1024 14y ago
    I've been wondering. How do I do that and also search for the exact phrase "iPhone 4"? Do I type "iPhone 4" "4"? (edit: this seems to work.)
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    Someone should write a browser extension or Greasemonkey script to automatically quote your Google search terms.
    - vaneck 14y ago
      Not an extension, but: http://finderr.org http://finderr.org Disclaimer: I made that, but I gain nothing from its usage and don't collect any private information (like the search terms).
    - spacemanaki 14y ago
      I discovered the "verbatim" option under the "More search tools" link on the left hand side recently. http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=g_verb&answer=1734130 http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... It's not as convenient as an extension or a script, of course.
      - sp332 14y ago
        It should be easy enough to write an extension or even a bookmarklet for this. You just have to add &tbs=li:1 to the end of the URL to enable "verbatim" mode.
    - Drbble 14y ago
      I have one such extension on my PC (but I am on my phone now, sorry. )
Anechoic 14y ago
“Less aggressive synonyms” For the love of god, yes. I just did a search where Google conveniently decided to substitute "bike" and "bicycle" for the word "cycle" (as in "a series of repeated events") Sigh.

ecesena 14y ago

Autocomplete math... looking forward ;)

joshuahedlund 14y ago

> Improvements to freshness. [launch codename "Abacus", project codename "Freshness"] We launched an improvement to freshness late last year that was very helpful, but it cost significant machine resources. At the time we decided to roll out the change only for news-related traffic. This month we rolled it out for all queries. > More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users. Hopefully this means fewer instances of searching for code help and seeing prominent results from 2005.

wickedchicken 14y ago
left side, 'show search tools' -> 'past year'.
- masonhensley 14y ago
  Ya, but that's still too much of a pain. 2 clicks.
- Drbble 14y ago
  You often still get results dated last week for pages that clearly state a byline years in the past.

Turing_Machine 14y ago

A very brief test indicates that search strings containing "Cocoa Webview" no longer return a bunch of useless crap* about Android webviews with the word "Cocoa" nowhere to be seen on the page. If that's the case: it's about time. *"Useless crap" is context-sensitive, of course -- no disrespect toward Android intended, but I go to the trouble of including "Cocoa" in my search Google shouldn't be giving me pages that don't even contain that word. It might be different if it were smart enough to just give you Objective C or iOS-focused pages that included "Webview", but not Cocoa, since there's at least some probability that those pages would be of interest. However, it wasn't that smart.

jskopek 14y ago

The new additions of UEFA, KHL, and tennis scores would seem to indicate that each snippet type is manually built and added by Google. I would have expected something a little bit broader; an algorithm that attempts to automatically parse score results for all major sports based on the pages they pull results from, or something to that effect. The former is way easier, and probably a whole lot more accurate, that the later, but it removes a little bit of the sex from the whole process. It also highlights how much work must be involved in building the snippet generators for a site like google.

pgrote 14y ago
Last year, there was an announcement Google and ESPN were starting to use micro data. http://frontrow.espn.go.com/2011/08/espn-google-and-microdata/ http://frontrow.espn.go.com/2011/08/espn-google-and-microdat... ESPN indicated they worked with Google for baseball, but maybe they completed the work for all sports: "Going forward our team is planning to create microdata-enhanced results for other sports like football, basketball, hockey, and soccer."
sherwin 14y ago
Well they do have snippets for certain facts: e.g. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=tom+cruise+age http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3... which is almost certainly a broader algorithm that tries to semantically parse out factual information.

epoxyhockey 14y ago

News from the boiler room in March: - Spinners hit hard - Text link sellers hit hard :)

pgrote 14y ago
What are spinners?
- epoxyhockey 14y ago
  Please explain article rewriting. EDIT: That was my #fail at answering the question with spun text. Duskwuff did it well!
- tptacek 14y ago
  Tools and systems that take a corpus of root text and create large number of variations of that content, to avoid duplicate content penalties when trying to stuff sites to catch Google's attention.
  - duskwuff 14y ago
    Or, as a a "spinning" script might reword it: > Implements and setups that take a corpus of tuber text and create meaty number of changes of that tranquil, to avoid duplicate content sanctions when trying to stuff localities to catch Google's contemplation.
  - emmelaich 14y ago
    Like serkey.com? God I hate that site; it came up with most of the front page for pretty much every Oracle related query lately. That it until these changes, apparently. Well done Google!

macrael 14y ago

Click through to the video of their search meeting. It seems really strange to me that something like that would be made public. I mean, it is pretty content free, but why spend so much effort to show the world deliberations on how to change search?

jaredmck 14y ago
Because it gives a sense of transparency to the process, when in reality google is far from transparent. If they made a big deal about how no one could see the meetings behind the curtain, the secret mystique might erode some of google's goodwill in the eyes of the public - especially if the us govt got involved. Most people, if they don't have a strong interest in tech & the Internet, only see the surface PR efforts, without having the background to notice that they're in fact heavily orchestrated PR. The strategy certainly seems to be working thus far - but I feel they might be pushing it a bit recently. More people seem to be noticing and thinking about it. Take a look at when google chooses to release news, especially "fun" news like robotic cars. They are great at the art of PR - which is not really a surprise if you own a tinfoil hat, because you never know - maybe they can get leading indicators through query & behavior mining across their dataset? :)
gojomo 14y ago
I find it amazing that there are 30-something people in the room & 9+ more by video. Some are almost certainly checking their email or doing other things – despite the small text insert that tries to suggest they're all looking at advanced analytics about the proposed changes. Very few speak or seem to be in a physical (or status) position where they could speak, though maybe as the topic changes, some of the giant peanut gallery gets engaged. Altogether, it fits a lot of meeting antipatterns. When I see perplexing things like this about Google, I have to wonder: is this a counterintuitive part of the secret sauce, or an indulgence whose cost is covered up by their gusher of quasi-monopolistic profits?
- moultano 14y ago
  That's a weekly meeting where proposed changes are discussed. Most of the people not speaking are there because they have a launch to present. Each one gets a lightning round of deliberation somewhat like the one in the video, a decision is made, and they move on to the next.

Drbble 14y ago

> “dog” may be incorrectly introduced as a synonym for > “cat”. We’ve been working for some time to appropriately > ferret out these brilliant. Also funny that they launched two Synonym features that appear to be be the same feature described in different words.

obtu 14y ago
This is a really cool part, those siblings and synonyms are making them build the rudiments of some kind of Watson-like concept net.

zoul 14y ago

Any chances of getting rid of the redirects in search results? It's so annoying that I can't simply copy the result link URL and paste without getting some crazy Google tracking URL instead. It's such an obvious fail that I can't see how it's possible to not have it fixed yesterday, it made me switch to a different search engine.

arbitrarywords 14y ago
I've installed a greasemonkey script called "Remove Google Redirection" that seems to work fine...
re 14y ago
It also breaks the browser history in Safari, which is really frustrating: http://i.imgur.com/pOQmo.png http://i.imgur.com/pOQmo.png
espinchi 14y ago
I don't think we'll get rid of this any time soon. This is rolled out only for a subset of the users [1], and I guess it provides Google with valuable analytics data. [1] As I can read in several articles in the internet, but can't find an authoritative source.
ivanshih 14y ago
There is an interesting discussion about this on stackexchange.com. "Turning off Google search results indirection": http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off-google-search-results-indirection http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off...
ranit8 14y ago
Noscript has a surrogate that solves this; it works even if scripts are enabled on google search page.

nsns 14y ago

>Improvements to handling of symbols for indexing. ...we’ve now started to index the following heavily used symbols: “%”, “$”, “\”, “.”, “@”, “#”, and “+”. We’ll continue to index more symbols as usage warrants. That, and the new "Verbatim' option, are really good news. There are also some five (10% of the entire list) timely tweaks to synonyms. All in all, it seems Google listens and tries to improve its service, which has become rather paternalistic lately ("you wrote X, but actually mean Y", no I don't!). Well done.

obtu 14y ago
I found relevant results for $_, $argv, @memoize, useful completion but no results for $@ and $#, nothing at all for $!. Python programmers rejoice, Perl programmers still mourn code search.

smackfu 14y ago

> More relevant image search results. [launch codename "Lice"] Really? Who picks these codenames?