Google Search Blog

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/search-quality-highlights-… Based on the second item of that list, might soon get some emoticon love on Google search.

You can also draw multiple functions by separating with a comma. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/showing-some-love-to-math-lov…

August 11th - Update to Sessions in Google Analytics (F*ck Up) - http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-to-sessions-in-google-ana… August 12th - Major International Algorithm Update "Panda" http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/high-quality-sites-algorithm-… great timing...

Google is useful to more people, which means it's less useful to people who are happy with things like the O Reilly Google Hacks. There's some switch somewhere to force it into "Literal" or "verbatim" mode. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452 http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-ver… (These are the posts that give me the '1 in 600 searches used the + operator correctly' factoid.) I think my current problems with Google are 1) Lack of predictability. I have no idea what terms might be substituted, or what they'll get subbed for. I don't know what terms get stemmed or not. 2) Recentism. Google is great at finding things from this year. Finding stuff from before 2000 is harder, and before 1990 is really tricky. (I don't have any examples! Normally I keep them.)[1] 3) Desire to return many hits. I'm happy if I enter a search term and don't get many hits. I'd rather have a few hits, rather than many hits that are less relevant. I'd rather have a few really bad hits, and thus know that I need to tweak my search terms, than get many sort of okay hits. But for most people Google is great. Having said that, I switched to mostly DDG and I really like it, except I'd like to be able to force a more English (and not US) result cloud; and I'd like to be able to enter a term, have it translated into other languages, and search for those. This would be a way to break out of the English speaking bubble. [1] I find it weirdly…

It's great to hear that DDG is doing well. The problem is that I will never switch over to it due to its shortcomings compared to Google and even Bing. I tried to give it a go for a day or so, but quickly realized the results being returned were not good enough. 1) It's not as accurate as Google. Sometimes DDG might return a better result (such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa), but 9/10 times Google is much more accurate. 2) DDG is playing catchup to a search engine that has hundreds of employees and a 10+ year head start. The types of queries DDG is trying to solve now were likely solved years ago and have been finely tuned numerous times. 3) I think this good video http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-… about sums up the type of problems they are solving now and how advanced their platform is. Google is tweaking an edge-case scenario that is only .1% of their traffic. That is more traffic than all of DDG. 4) If DDG is all about respecting privacy and not tracking users, then use Google or Bing in incognito mode. Problem solved. I'm not trying to be negative, but all signs point to a losing battle.

Google Now integrates with Lyft instead of Uber, so it's not necessarily consistent across Google products http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2015/01/google-app-update-get-now-car…

For those checking google.com to see update, you might have to wait. It'll be rolled out gradually over the next couple of weeks. http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2013/09/updating-google-bar-many-produ… It would be nice to see that mentioned in the TechCrunch article, though.

As mentioned above, this launched in mid 2011: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/09/early-look-at-our-flight-sear… Also accompanied by Google Hotel Finder: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/07/google-hotel-finder.html https://www.google.com/hotelfinder

If you want to mention some recent searches that disappointed you, I'm happy to pass that on to the quality team here. If you're unhappy that Google is trying to autocorrect spelling or add/remove search terms, you might try the verbatim search tool: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verba…

Google's announcement of the change has clear language stating that they are using the takedown notices that Google receives for the scoring: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-update-to-our-search-algor…

Yup. Search by text, voice, or image - Google Inside Search Blog - July 14th, 2011 http://insidesearch.blogspot.ca/2011/06/search-by-text-voice-or-image.…

Earlier this year Google announced that they will roll out HTTPS-by-default to all localized Googles. I guess they haven't got it done yet. http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/bringing-more-secure-search-a…

Very cool. Worked for all equations I tried with x and/or y but not z. Also doesn't work with greek letters. Worked with f(x) but not ƒ(x) or f(x,y). Edit: Here's the official announcement http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/graphing-on-googlecom-now-in-…

I wonder if Google is getting trapped near a local peak. I watched the video they released on improving search quality yesterday (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-search-quality-meeting-… and was initially impressed that they gave so much thought to slightly improving a small subset of 0.1% of queries. That meeting must have had 40 people attending! But afterwards it left me with the feeling that Google is becoming so big and entrenched in old ways of doing things, that they may not be focusing enough on the next big improvement in search. Penalties and heuristics can only go so far -- eventually they'll need something approaching AI -- and if any company can do it it's Google.

Does this include so-called verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verba… I don't use it but I'm curious to know if the problems you're encountering also happen with this new feature.

Have neither of you heard of verbatim search? http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verba… Or turning off Search Plus Your World? http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAALU/ZFkWokAl… No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?