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Tue, 08 Dec 2009
Keep it stupid, stupid!
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How hard is it to build a good search engine? Very hard. So far I thought that only one company has managed to build a search engine that's not only decent, but good.
Sadly, they seem to have overdone it. Today I searched for tagged dfa. I was looking for a technique used in regex engines. On the front page three out of ten results actually dealt with the subjects, the other uses of dfa meant dog friendly area, department of foreign affairs or other unrelated things.
That's neither bad nor unexpected. But I wanted more specific results, so I decided against using the abbreviation, and searched for the full form: tagged deterministic finite automaton. You'd think that would give better results, no?
No. It gave worse. On the first result page only one of the hits actually dealt with the DFAs I was looking for. Actually the first hit contained none of my search terms. None. It just contained a phrase, which is also sometimes abbreviated dfa.
WTF? Google seemed to have internally converted my query into an ambiguous, abbreviated form, and then used that to find matches, without filtering. So it attempted to be very smart, and came out very stupid.
I doubt that any Google engineer is ever going to read this rant. But if one is: Please, Google, keep it stupid, stupid.
I'm fine with getting automatic suggestions on how to improve my search query; but please don't automatically "improve" it for me. I want to find what I search for. I'm not interested in dog friendly areas.
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Huri wrote
Tell google "give me what I want"
Wrap the multiple word search term in quotes. So for instance, use:
tagged "deterministic finite automaton"
As your search query. Not only does it then require the words to show up in that order, but it disables the automatic acronym results too.
I agree that Google tries to be too smart sometimes. It seems far too often it is necessary to trick it into giving you the search results you are looking for.
Moritz wrote
Tricks work
Thanks Huri. Yes, I can trick Google into doing what I want. or I can just use Yahoo instead, which (in this case) gives more interesting results anyway.
The point is that software in general often tries to be too smart, and then the user has some effort to trick it into being dumb again. Which is quite contrary to what it's supposed to do.
Google used to be have a fair balance on that point, but now it seems to have inclined towards too much "intelligence".
Jan I wrote
Use the words you want to search for
I know the title sounds nasty, but you complain that Google doesn't return relevant results for regular expressions, yet you do not tell Google that you want to search for regular expressions.
Searching for the following seems to yield relevant results:
tagged dfa regex
tagged dfa regexp
Reverting to Yahoo! seems like a no-win to me; many ISPs and webserver admins block Yahoo! web crawlers because they can crush a running webserver, so Yahoo! will likely not return as many relevant hits as other search engines.
Perhaps Microsoft's Bing is better.
Moritz wrote
I used the words I want to search for
Jan, I did tell google that I wanted tagged deterministic finite automatons. Not just DFAs.
I fully understand that I get ambiguous (and bad) results when searching for DFA.
Moritz wrote
Bing
Speaking of Yahoo and Bing - I blocked the bing crawler on some of my sites, because it was a referrer spammer. See http://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/logs-bing/ for somebody with a similar experience
Andreas wrote
Another possibility is to add a +
e.g. +deterministic
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