This is fascinating. Not because of the content of this article, but because it's the first glimpse behind the Google Search curtain that I've ever seen in an official Google post. You rarely see details about search explained. Or maybe I'm just ignorant.
Even that bit about "don't" being turned into "don t" was interesting. Again, not because I was amazed in any way. More so because Search has been so mysterious for many years.
I work on Google search, and have been posting in threads about it for quite some time here taking feedback, asking for examples to debug, and passing them on when I get them.
One request from me would be for them to bring back the + operator and favour it instead of quotes, since Google Plus integration doesn't seem to be a thing anymore.
Honestly I think using quotes for that is probably better, even though + was a bit less typing. You wouldn't believe how many people search for [tar -xvf] and are confused as to why none of their search results contain the string xvf. It's hard to come up with operators that are easy to type and will never collide with their normal meaning in language, and I think quotation marks work much better for that than + did.
I explained elsewhere that it's very unlikely to come back because we actually do try to match + in queries now for thing like international phone numbers, and also as someone else noted, there's any number of names that make use of it (Disney+ for example).
How about a heuristic of: If the user phrases their search as a natural language query ("what is...?", "how do I...", etc...) then use whatever weird relevancy metrics and search word substitution your research suggests will answer the question best. OTOH, if the user appears to phrase their search as just a list of keywords, search for all the words verbatim.
They already do query classification for things like Google Calculator. Extending the classifier to switch between "natural language query" and "strict keyword search" seems like a reasonable extension of that idea.
Ok - I totally understand the intent, but NOOOOOOOO!!!! (or more clearly: I have no problem with them trying this, but it doesn't solve my use case)
The entire reason I ask is because I don't want google to try to interpret my search query and change it - I don't want it to guess what I'm looking for using [insert classifier of choice] - I want it to do as close to a text scan for the exact search query as I can get.
Inconsistent tools are much harder to use. I really don't want to have to play a cat and mouse game with my search tool, and I don't want to have to have memorized all the "games" google is playing with my query and understand how to turn them off.
While we have you here, can you guys take a look at why the Google Cache feature is very hard to find nowadays? It's almost as if most big sites don't have an option to see the cached version, and even when they do, finding the "Cached" button on desktop seems impossible, this started happening ever since the "More :" menu got redesigned (to show "about this result"), the cached button just isn't there sometimes. (Ex: Amazon).
Even better is when they do show the 'cache' button but don't actually have anything cached, so if the site is down their 'cache' is broken. They think users are too stupid to notice.
Please remove Pinterest, or at least lower their relevancy. So often when searching for images the are higher up then the source page the Pinterest image is from and don’t link back to it.
Why isn't there a reasonably priced Google Search API?
Besides being overpriced, the last I checked, the results returned for the custom search didn't reflect what was returned from the normal search product.
It seems like Google often rewards low quality results: Sites with tons of ads or where I'm being shilled to buy a product that I'm looking for information on because I already have it. It's so bad that I've half-concluded it's due to misaligned incentives - keeping the user looking at the search results keeps Google collecting ad revenue and steering users to crappy sites full of ads also keeps Google collecting ad revenue.
If we are speculating why Google is now caring to pay attention to user reports, I strongly feel such things usually precede a wave of user monetization.
I would not be surprised if the ads situation gets worse or some other egregious action takes place, as if to say, "Remember how we fixed search results for you? Well, here's how we plan to pay for it".
Brave Search is quite good. They basically trained their model to give the same results as Google, but they give prioritized sections to real discussions. Plus they have a cool goggles experiment.
Mojeek is hit or miss, but occasionally does better than Google.
I haven't really used it myself, but I've heard good things about Kagi.
I started using as a test drive (as I have been a happy DDG user before that).
I really like the fact that there is no ad, I can easily rank the pages or even block them (be gone w3schools) and ultimately I don't ever have to go to google anymore. The result are quite solid, even for local non-english searches which DDG struggles a bit.
after a few weeks of trying all the different (free) options, I found that anything longer than 3 keywords and Google is the only option. duckduckgo doesn’t even have [consistently working] quote search
Personally I find myself using bing more. Nothing against google search, but a lot of times I just cannot find what I need in google so I go over to bing to see if I have better luck. Sometimes I do. Although, google search is still better, for now.
Google defines what good search results are. Any company trying to compete with them is just tilting at windmills. They'll always be a step behind, forever. "Hey, why does Google show me x and DDG doesn't?", "Why is it so hard to find x on DDG, it's on the first page of Google." Etc. It will never be the reverse for 99% of users.
And face it, for all its flaws, Google's index is larger, it has more servers, has way more signals to use - including its own web browser, DNS and ads - more money to spend and actual computer scientists who've been banging away at the problem for decades. Bing is just Microsoft's way of siphoning off some search revenues from the most technically illiterate users who don't know better and never change their defaults on their Windows box they bought at Walmart. MS has zero incentive to improve the results.
DDG is a cute little boutique web site. Good for them. But their impact on Google Search is so small as to be non-existent.
That used to be the case. It's why they rose to dominance (that and the "no extra crap on the page"). Nowadays, Google's search results are pretty meuh. However, the domain has become much more adversarial with many companies devoted to manipulating search results for a fee. Not sure, perhaps "meuh" is the best we can hope for nowadays.
If a service can consistently deliver good results on the first page (like Google used to, 20-odd years ago), they could definitely dethrone Google. Of course, the moment that appears to be the case, all SEO spammers start focusing on the new rival and the newcomer's job becomes a lot harder.
google results seem meh when you compare them to google results. go and try and use duckduckgo or brave search for anything more than basic one or two keyword searches, and you’ll be back to google like a shot
That's just not true. I switched from google at least two years ago (first to cliqz now DDG), and haven't looked back ever since. And I run pretty technical queries. When I try google again, it's not better, and many times it's worse.
I've been setting DDG as my default search engine on all browsers for at least 4 or 5 years.
Sometimes I get terrible results and add a !g to my search query to see if le gouglè gives me something better. Almost every time it's just as bad. Usually because of SEO crap.
When was the last time you tried. It is somewhat topic dependent but I've been using brave for a couple of month and have not missed any (except for significantly less content farm results). I sometimes revert back to Google, but at the same time I also used other engines for better results when on Google.
I tried a couple of weeks ago. my conclusions were solidly in favour of google, despite reluctance on privacy concerns
I felt that for technical searches past a certain number of keywords (2 or 3), ddg and brave tend to lose focus where google doesn’t, a problem exacerbated by the lack of quote search on either
google also much better answers local questions, like “[supermarket] [location] opening times”, and indexes wikipedia more usefully, plus ten other integrated features you don’t miss until they’re gone (e.g. imdb)
I didn’t notice a change in SEO spam between the alternatives. I would imagine brave have made an effort here, but as far as I know, duckduckgo filters their content less than google does
finally, brave lacks maps, which is incredibly annoying
I started using DDG a number of years ago out of principle, even though its search results were clearly worse than Google's (but still mostly acceptable). Quite often I fell back to Google to get better results.
After a while, things started to change. I don't feel the need to fall back to Google nearly as often anymore, and when I do I'm very unhappy with the results from Google. They're often worse than what I get from DDG.
YMMV of course. And yes, DDG's impact on Google Search is probably negligible, but market share is often only verly lightly related to quality.
Good morning! Always fun to come back and see a pretty straightforward comment getting downvoted to oblivion. :-)
To be clear, I wasn't saying the current state of affairs was a good thing, I was simply stating in detail that Google is still a gargantuan machine. Unless a competitor is somehow able to fire a couple of torpedoes down a hidden exhaust port, they're all going to be outgunned for the foreseeable future. But sure, the unpredictable vagaries of public sentiment could somehow turn against them, I guess. I mean, it's going to be a while. Their company name is a verb.
Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you on that. I was part of the Kagi beta test and I think the results were on average better than Google, and not just for lack of ads. I'm not a Google hater either, but their systems are just not as far in front as they used to be.
What's the fundamental rule to get users to switch products or services? Answer: 10x.
When a competitor's results are 10 times better than Google's - not a little better, or sometimes better, or better if you add a special character to your search, or subjectively better based on your personal preference, but an actual order of magnitude better - then and only then will Google even begin to start worrying about its dominant position in search.
"But Russ," I can hear you say, "How can a search result be 10x better? That's a straw man. What does it even mean to be 'better'? Faster? More accurate? More contextual? More personal? More predictive? Less spam? More niche sites? Less niche sites? More photos? More videos? More news? Less photos? Less videos? Less news? More languages? Less languages? More international? More local? More convenient? More customizable? How can you even measure something like that?"
For me, not feeling spied on was the big part and the search results were also much more consistent and less frustrating. The final parts were the ads, and that I simply try to avoid Google products.
10x sounds like a lot but for me personally Kagi is probably like 30x when you take all the factors into consideration.
Well, when you can't get the result on Google no matter how you finesse your query, but you can get it on another search engine, is that infinity better?
Disagree. I use DDG because I'm frustrated with Google search results. And granted, sometimes Google is better, so I just add "!g" to my query and let DDG redirect me to Google.
for me I’d be very happy to just use google through a proxy service. google now hides images and maps behind a cookie consent page, so if you’ve got their cookies blocked, you can’t access then
Have to disagree. I've tried DDG and was never impressed enough to switch from Google, but I have found Yandex to increasingly give better curated results, especially for stuff originating in Europe. Bing has also gotten much better, but I don't find it adds anything to Yandex+Google.
IMO, the secret behind Google Search is not the smartness of the algorithms, but how much of it is baked in those O(100ms) which takes Google machines to answer your query. That's why the links above are the true reason Google Search performs well.
Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval state of the art is far beyond what Google/Bing/Yahoo/Yandex/Baidu employ. But, it's far too expensive to serve it at QPS & latency required for decent UX.
I'd be super interested in a higher quality delayed search. Just each day you could go and look at your search queries from the day before and it would list any better results it found with more time.
Then again maybe i'm underestimating how often I don't know exactly what I'm looking for and just grab the first result.
Hi, would you know if there are any good explanations on whether Google searches (or in general the search strategy) say, creates a general search result for any given query, which is then tweaked with customizations specific to individuals / locations / languages? I.e. they've "saved" the basic search output in advance so that core doesn't have to be run each time, and only adjust around the edges specific to a user?
Or is that not how it's done, and each search, for a given person, follows the same process?
While there's some very short caching of results, to my understanding, there's generally still going to be a lot of hitting the index because there's just a lot of new information coming in all the time. We can't somehow store a set of results for say "cars" and figure it's going to be the same info from one minute to the next.
And results don't really have a lot of personalization for individuals. When you see differences, it's usually due to language and location.
It's only "myseterious" because google will have everyone believe so. They certainly have some of (if not the) best tuned algorithms for indexing and querying on the planet, but there's no angel dust or dark magic at work. (And frankly given how unreliable search in gmail is I'm amazed they keep their head above water)
"don't" being turned into "don t" is due to the way search indexes work. It's a computer science problem, not Google specific.
The index is like a dictionary - you look things up by word. But you need to find some way to split up every page on the internet to decide what is a 'word' and what isn't. If you decide that quote marks are part of a word, then you'll end up with apple and apple' making different entries in the index which you probably didn't want.
Or maybe because it's impossible to guarantee that you'll find what you're looking for and you may not even be looking for anything specific, making "search" a more honest and literal term? I'm not saying Google results haven't been getting worse, but blaming that on Google entirely instead of rampant SEO (which is mostly used by people who want to make money, not people who want to provide useful information) and the lack of hand curated directories to steal relevant results from are likely just as detrimental to good search results as Google's ad prioritization. While Google certainly hasn't been helping, the web has been falling apart (in terms of usability at least) for at least a decade. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetency.
I had a customer once that wanted a 'find' feature instead of a 'search' feature. Which was not a bad idea, it makes sense, you want to find something not just search for it. However, they also insisted the 'find' button would fall and bounce a few times after you click it. You win some, you lose some ;)
Actually, often you must first "search" (aka go to some search page to enter search terms) and only then you can click the button "find" - unless the search controls are already on the page you're on.
Even that bit about "don't" being turned into "don t" was interesting. Again, not because I was amazed in any way. More so because Search has been so mysterious for many years.