Google Previews New Search Infrastructure 129
Google has announced a "developer preview" of a new search infrastructure, though one wouldn't have to be a developer to try it out. Google is asking for feedback on how the search results in the new regime stack up against the old. Matt Cutts has posted a mini FAQ. Some early testing indicates that the new search may be faster in some cases, and return more relevant results, than the old one. Those who attempt to game Google search for a living will be scrambling henceforth. Has anyone identified the new crawler bot in log files?
Re:Major Disapppointment (Score:3, Insightful)
New crawler bot... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would there be a new crawler?? How many more copies of the Interwebs does Google need?
G.
New algorithm = more relevant results (Score:5, Insightful)
The more relevant results may be just because the algorithm is new, so the SEOs couldn't yet optimize for it. If it really gives more relevant results will be seen after it is the main search algorithm for some time.
Remember, in the beginning the old algorithm used to be very good in finding relevant results.
Re:New algorithm = more relevant results (Score:3, Insightful)
The web itself has changed too, for reasons other than SEO (though it's sometimes hard to tell which is which). PageRank isn't a universal law of nature, with the "best" result to any particular query being related to how many incoming links a particular site has. Rather, it's a heuristic based on something that often happened to be true--- the most useful information was located on pages at sites that were frequently linked to. It's possible that correlation is no longer as strong as it used to be.
Re:New algorithm = more relevant results (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad this can only be modded to +5. It needs to be made 'sticky' to the top of the thread (and every goddamn Google programmer's forehead, ever).
Seriously: can we PLEASE have the ability to accurately filter things via syntax include/exclude and grouping again? I know it still 'works' but it doesn't work half a damn. Every once in a while I'll google for an error or some such and i'll have to prune it down to a handful of terms to even get results (and I know there should be more than just a handful for these kinds of things, because it's not uncommon.) Google is becoming almost useless for technical searches.
Re:Major Disapppointment (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is "putting cruft on search results page so that it is barely usable" and "not implementing sessions and cookies" evolution? Google won because it was nice and clean compared to altavista and yahoo.
Social networking sites ranked lower (Score:3, Insightful)
Progress!
Re:Major Disapppointment (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to equate "features" with quality of the search engine.
Some value
- speed
- a clean interface and
- relevance of the search results (which can be improved by analyzing my previous searches)
If you want to surf the web anonymously, use TOR. Trusting the site saying "we don't have server logs, PROMISE" is silly.
Re:New algorithm = more relevant results (Score:2, Insightful)
Well - I guess "EXACT" means different things to us then ...
In my world "foo bar baz" is not the same as:
"foo, bar, baz" :bar, :baz"
"foo,
"foo = bar = baz"
"foo->bar->baz"
Oh well ... could just be me ...
Re:Major Disapppointment (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem is that the web is ever-expanding in it's multimedia capabilities... and our ability to index such media is falling woefully behind. We don't have any magic software to scan through a video, identifying objects, and sorting out major themes to tag it with... that's left to the folks who upload them. The same could be said for pictures and audio... and even, in some cases, text. How many times have you been searching for some form or other that some company keeps a PDF of that is a scanned image from a hard copy (so that the text is not search-able)?
More hard research needs to be done into automatically creating indexing terms for all of the various media out there. Once this starts to happen, we have a chance (albeit small) of taming the web.
Re:New algorithm = more relevant results (Score:5, Insightful)
I could live with the current semantics just fine if there were two Google modes: research and purchase. When I search for "Laserjet 4000" in research mode, I'm explicitly saying that I'm searching for pages ABOUT Laserjet 4000 printers, and absolutely not looking for a way to BUY a Laserjet 4000. Contextually isolating these two modes would be hugely helpful. When I want to buy a Widget and I'm simply looking for the best deals, I don't want a bunch of pages where people are reviewing or discussing the product. When I want to fix my Widget, I don't want a bunch of pages trying to sell me a new one. Sometimes a mixture is good, but for me it usually isn't.
Bye-Bye content spinners!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is going to mess up the content spinners and the paragraph swappers who are trying to either attract ads or build a link farm. Those who have well-build, informative, content-rich pages can sit back and watch the fun.
"Content Spinning" [associatedcontent.com] explained, kinda sorta
Re:SEO results (Score:2, Insightful)
Conversely, if a search result goes from #44 to #4 simply because someone paid some SEO firm to make that happen, the search results should state so explicitly. When you pay for SEO you're feeding a disease that renders the search algorithms increasingly ineffective. Gaming a public resource is selfish, and with this "reset" by Google you're witnessing how your actions can come back to hurt you in the long run.
Please explain how paid gaming of the system is objective.