So, what are people using as alternatives these days? I use gmail, google talk and google.com exclusively for email, chat and search. If (for arguments sake) I wanted to switch what is there of similar quality that still be around and relevant in 3 or 4 years?
I know. I'm not a hater.. really =) I just can't seem to make myself go back to MS stuff. I guess it's an old prejudice, I'm stubborn to my own detriment?
http://duckduckgo.com is an excellent search engine that takes user privacy seriously.
For me it tends to fail on very specific queries and then I use it's Google Bang to just have it redirect me to Google. But it's as good as Google for my typical queries.
Google Talk is plain vanilla XMPP (except the audio/video extensions), and any XMPP server can chat to any Google Talk user. The Google Talk client itself is shit and hasn't been updated in years, you won't be missing out on anything there.
I use Mail.app w/ GMail over IMAP and have no problems. I could switch to any other provider of course, but see no reason to do so as accessing GMail over IMAP doesn't have any of this social crap associated with it. Unfortunately, on Windows I'm forced to use gmail.com as no desktop client comes even close to Mail.app's fully integrated and optimized IMAP support. Outlook's IMAP support is STILL blocking/synchronous for most operations, hanging the entire software while it syncs headers or sends items to be erased. Thunderbird is as clunky as ever.
Google is the only one left, then. I used DDG for a while, but I think they need to step up their game with regards to simplifying the UI (i.e. remove the attempts at finding the info you're looking for for you or at least provide an option to disable this) and speed up both page serves and queries, w/ geodistributed caching, etc.
Or you could just use Google SSL, but disable all cookies for that domain.
I agree with the google talk. The most replaceable item on the list. It's just so easy though with it being there next to my email...
I'll give ddg a go. See what's up there.
I think fastmail.fm provides[1] email as well as xmpp. I have been considering a switch from gmail to fastmail (also looking at rackspace email), and planning to use my own domain again.
I had previously self hosted (a pain), and then used google apps with my own domain. That was when google apps had no google groups or other integration at all, and it was cumbersome to have two google accounts (no multiple login then either). So I switched to plain gmail. Certainly less work and the bonus of being able to tell people 'blah blah at gmail dot com' and not having to spell it out every time someone asked for it cannot be understated.
My needs have changed a bit though, and being able to retain my email/domain should I choose to change providers again has become more important. In addition, I no longer use the gmail web interface, opting instead to use sparrow over imap. An unlikely shift back to client centric computing even while more and more of my other services are shifting away!
My impression is that Bing is getting better and better. I WILL switch to it IF they provide date filtering for all searches. (For example it's impossible for me to use Bing for searching on HN because I get out of date results, while on Google I just apply the "last 24 hrs" filter).
I went back to hosting my own email and chat on VPS. Check out iRedMail for a nice easily-configured FOSS mail package and ejabberd for a nice XMPP server. XMPP federates with google talk, so I can still chat with @gmail.com friends.
Google talk is pretty replaceable with many other jabber based servers, and clients, and enough variance that you can generally find a solution that works best for you. afaict, Jabber messages can cross from and too the standard google talk jabber domains.
Search, I still find myself using google from time to time, but my default search is duckduckgo, this is greatly helped due to the fact that it's simple to search from google instead by simply adding !g to the search, additionally, you can do similar things for !gmaps !gimages !bing, this feature alone makes ddg a trivially better google replacement for default search.
Now, a decent replacement for the gmail client, I haven't been able to find something satisfactory web-based, or even as a desktop app. I use thunderbird for work emails, but it seems to be a little... lacking.
yeah, I can deal with the jabber client, I'll try ddg, but gmail is kinda sticky =) Maybe I'll roll my own or something. I guess I know what I like, right?
Windows Live Calendar nowadays is very similar to Google Calendar.
It should be possible to sync it e.g. with Android via ActiceSync. Some time ago I managed to do this with Android 2.3. I don't have this setup any more, so if you need details try searching for "windows live activesync" or something similar.
Hmph, I'd forgotten that. Interesting that we wouldn't do that sort of thing now. It would seem too rude to mention Google explicitly. Whereas when we first started YC we were so obscure we couldn't successfully be rude to anyone.
It also dates it, in the same way that "Bill and Steve won't respect you in the morning" would make it uniquely a thing of ten years prior. Whereas making it generic makes it more timeless, and timelessness is good design in general.
(edit) Why am I at -1? Balmer is a more reasonable match for Bill, but he is not a founder. Jobs is a better fit, but it is odd to see him paired with Gates.
In fairness, that was probably just about the time Google Calendar clipped Kiko's wings, which may have smarted. Also, back then, you probably may not have realized that the new method of funding you were pioneering would create an incubator for Google acquisitions. (i.e. you may not have realized you were poking your own customers in the eye.)
I love the idea, but there is no way I am moving to the US, especially not to start a tech company, even if you pay me. Silicon valley may have a lot of talent and money, and Y combinator is awesome, but I'd rather not deal with the TSA, the DEA and the DHS. Fascist oligarchies are not conducive to startups.
Twitter and Foursquare are fairly prominent examples, though in both cases the founders were people who became Google employees when their previous startups were acquired.
Among startups we've funded, I know at least Greplin, Optimizely, Appjet, and ReMail have/had founders who previously worked at Google. I'm sure there are at least that many more, but I don't remember where most of the people we funded worked before.
Hrm. AppJet and ReMail were both acquired by Google though. Greplin and Optimizely Googlers both had years at other companies between Google and the founding their companies.
I guess Biz Stone came directly from Google to found Twitter.
Given Google's size and the quality of the people who go in there, I'd have expected dozens if not hundreds of companies to be spawned by ex-Googlers.
I often wonder if certain companies simply produce more founders because of culture, money or simply bias in who they hire. PayPal is the classic example of a company that pumped out a good number of successful founders, but I can't identify any particular characteristic of that particular company that might have caused it.
I'd love to see some analytics about where the most successful or prolific founders come from.
From what I understand, turnover at Google is very low, especially among high ranking engineers. That might be why you see fewer ex-Googler startups than one might expect.
I don't know so much about Google employees, but what defines usually the capability of good entrepreneurs is that they are pied off with something in their environment, and have the will, leadership and capability to change things for the better.
Google may have very good technical people, i.e. they are capable, but I am not sure how they would fare as "leaders", "influencers", etc... it's also a company culture thing. If your company does not promote that kind of behavior, it is very unlikely you will see people stepping out to try things on their own. And if Google is successful at making their employees happy in some way or another, that also puts the barrier of leaving Google to a much higher point.
A minor observation corroborating your hypothesis is looking at how many people Google's accumulated from the old Bell Labs (Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, etc.). In some ways the Bell Labs culture was the diametric opposite of startup culture, with a typical career path of "stay in this job for life", and little interest in business or striking out on your own. I believe a few have said as much, that they moved to Google because it was a place where they had the resources and freedom to just focus on technology.
I've known plenty of really sharp, talented developers that have zero interest in ever even looking at a P&L sheet.
When you've immersed yourself in a certain sub-culture (say startups), it's sometimes easy to forget that not everyone out there shares that model of thinking.
Foursquare is not the most inspiring story, no. Google acquired them, killed Dodgeball, and Foursquare was created in protest. At least the way I recall it.
Big success takes longer to be visible since early acquisitions are typically small. I think weatherbill is doing very well, and there are quite a few promising yc companies started by former Googlers (such as optimizely). And of course 2/3 of the Twitter founders were previously at Google. I might also mention FriendFeed :)
Wait, what? It sounds like you are defining success or failure solely in terms of whether there is a big-money exit or not. That seems so... sad. What ever happened to "provides employment" and "provides value to its customers"?
Anyway, I'm an ex-Googler who started a company after leaving. It's still too early to say whether we'll be "successful" by any metric, but I'm really enjoying it so far, which is enough for now.
No, it is just that exits are an easy to see measure of success. Any company that is no longer a startup or had significant traction would be a good measure of success as well.
Fair 'nuff. I think the Google Alumni organization tries to keep track of some things like that, but I have no idea how successful they are. I've never bothered telling them what I am up to. :-P
What ever happened to "provides employment" and "provides value to its customers"?
Largely depends, I suspect, on the level of VC involvement. Most (all?) would be looking for a big-money exit in the future- just ticking along nicely means their bet doesn't pay off so well.
Exactly! This is actually why I am in no real hurry to look for VC-type investment. Taking VC money at least appears to eliminate the "middle ground" for the business, one becomes obligated to shoot for big money or go bust trying.
It took me quite a while to come to this conclusion though and I still wonder if I'm missing something obvious. :-)
Robot think-tank Willow Garage has a large mindshare with their ROS Open Source robot stack, and is having an appreciable impact in the robot research community. Founder Scott Hassan was a very early Googler and is thus very rich. WG doesn't need to make money in the short term: it's success should be measured in other ways.
I certainly agree with this. Back at the beginning of this century there was speculation that Google was so lavish with their perks because they didn't want those smart people going off and competing with them. Not as worried about that I guess.
Larry certainly does seem to have take Steve Jobs admonishment to heart. Which can give a company tremendous focus. Its an interesting time.
I used to remind people at the Googleplex that they were walking around in SGI's tomb. I found that was rarely appreciated :-)
So here is that challenge for this decade: Leave Google and kill Hollywood. Seems like a reasonable goal to me.
Seriously. I didn't know what they called it, but if it was an idea coming from Google, then it's a really stupid name. Even Google autocompletes it to "spyware" and it starts with SPY. Come on.
If you google it, it's currently the 3rd and 4th search results.
Now, if you google SPYW on Bing then it's nowhere to be found, and that's ultimately why I continue to use Google for search regardless of whatever nonsense they put in the side bar.
Looks the same as it did for me a few hours ago when I searched on it, and duck duck go uses bing search.
I see definitions in the extracts at #4, #6, #7, #8 and #10. It's hard to believe half of the top ten changed in the last 3 hours.
EDIT: I do agree that bing's results are slightly-somewhat below google's as I do redo a search in google maybe 5% or 10% of the time, but from the point of view of someone who uses them every day they are pretty close for most things.
I'd never searched anything like this before, and I'm not using the Bing bar or anything. I didn't even try it in Google first (I did try it after, obviously)
I skimmed the article (missing a couple of mentions) trying to work out what it was. Ended up having to Google it and then checked to see if anyone here had explained it.
Is this a big thing for Google+ users? Hadn't stumbled across it at all.
This all makes no never-mind to me, as I'm going to turn that right off (you can do that, right?). I prefer to evaluate on my own what information is relevant and what isn't. Happy accidents, you know.
Did Google ever announce what the rationale for this is, from a revenue perspective? Is a link with content that a person is likely to recognize also likely to generate extra revenue?
The rationale is clearly to drive traffic to their own products at the expense of competitors like twitter and facebook. SPYW is just more advertising, except for now it's limited to google properties. They're obviously banking that people won't notice or care that most search results are now paid placements.
They'll still no doubt be using geolocation to filter results, as well as time of day, browser being used, etc...
At their scale, they can no doubt see patterns in data that make it worth personalising search based on those factors, regardless of wether or not you are signed in.
> There’s a full-on war for developer talent that the company has already been struggling with– along with every single startup and sexier large companies like Facebook, Twitter and Zynga.
What makes Zynga, Twitter and Facebook "sexier"?
> Then again, a lot of what we’re hearing is from X-Googlers. Google has been competing for employees for a while by simply shelling out more cash. Perhaps newer hires are just there for the paycheck, more than the much-vaunted mission.
What percentage of Zynga hires are there for the paycheck as opposed to the "mission"?
I had the opportunity to interact with a couple of Zynga guys on the train once shortly after the "we're clawing back your RSUs or you're fired" fiasco. The good news, for Zynga, is that it didn't seem to hurt morale for those guys. The bad news is that they didn't care and had an "as long as it's not me" holding-out-for-the-big-bucks mercenary attitude.
But then, maybe Zynga's just a morally bankrupt go-for-the-bucks mercenary company so perhaps they're a perfect fit.
I think the author intended that as sexier than other large companies, meaning it is sexier to work at Facebook than microsoft, SAP, Oracle, or whatever.
Well, sounds like the man has a vision, and is being unambiguous about what it is. I can appreciate that, at least. Count me among the folks that don't "get it", though.
It is quite the jump from “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" to "Agree with SPYW or GTFO". One is an admirable goal for a whale of a company and the other is a stubborn denial of contrary opinions. I thought Pando Daily was suppose to be a "different" tech news site.
Something like Ars Technica, which is way meatier than the hyperbole and cheerleading that the PandoLemonCrunch school of venture journalism is capable of.
Tech news does tend to head towards this kind of article. I think they will have some in depth long form pieces mixed in with the standard stuff. I think the problem is that to really drive page views you need a lot of this stuff, many posts a day. Going in depth will earn you some different readers at the cost of some others and people won't revisit nearly as often.
Yeah, the quote seems pretty clearly to be in reference to Google Plus in general and the universal toolbar and redesigns they've been rolling out, not the social search results specifically. Pretty misleading article.
That depends totally on the context (what question was that an answer to, how much ranting had there been on other internal fora before that, what was the tone of the answer, etc).
Given the context, it's not much of a jump. Both the fact that this was said at an event after the "Search Plus Your World Launch" and also the strong emotion implied by "you should probably work somewhere else" indicate that this was mostly about their shift into social.
My guess is the event had nothing to do with the launch, it seems more likely to be the weekly TGIF meeting (http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/culture.html). I don't really see much strong emotion. It is a CEO saying this is the direction we are taking, so if you don't like it then you are going to continue to not like it.
Of course, Lacy's take is the direction = SPYW as it was launched (as it is the news of the moment), which I more charitably interpret his words as direction = unification of Google products.
I disagree. I can get the "facts" from Twitter or Reddit or HN. What's missing from those streams, however, is a well thought out intellectual discussion about the facts and what they mean from different points of view.
The OP is a bit light on discussion, however that doesn't mean they should do no discussion whatsoever.
That's because eyeballs are what matter, not accuracy or responsible journalism.
TV journalism's decline in America took decades before we got to the current trash; the exact same process happened to journalist blogs over a couple years in the mid-to-late 2000s.
When the top executives at your employer are saying "If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" it means precisely "the matter is decided, agree, go along quietly, or GTFO".
Leaders should lead with a unique style. Their way.
Larry's playing catchup with Facebook while thinking he can be Steve Jobs, and that, together with guarding the cents by removing the little things that made life @Google awesome (bagels anyone?) has led to low morale among the workforce.
Geeks with low morale don't get shit done.
They don't innovate. They don't create.
Google staff aren't code monkeys, they're not going to stick around to keep the seats warm.
The good ones will spend every hour of the day doing the bare minimum required to still get a paycheck while finding a new job.
It's money not passion that's preventing them leaving. And that's a pretty depressing atmosphere to work in.
You can turn it around and ask: Really? Is the morale of the employees not worth the cost of a bagel?
Removing the small benefits sends a message to the employees -- and it's the wrong message to send.
In my company, we've had lots of nice little luxuries in our kitchen. Slowly, they removed these, bit by bit. They save an astonishingly small amount, but morale did suffer because of that. Our extra happiness at the workplace is not worth the cents to the management -- is basically the message.
If so, I am confused as to where this sentiment is coming from. We still get our three free meals a day, 30" monitors, standing desks, microkitchens no more than 100 feet away, and many other perks. I'm certainly encouraged to work hard, not only because the compensation is good, but because writing software at Google is so fun.
I think the media is getting the wrong impression of what internal problems Google has. Most don't say anything publicly because the internal discussion fora are much nicer than ones on the "real Internet", and because it's hard to speak publicly about Google without speaking for Google and accidentally revealing something confidential. Anyone saying "Larry Page said XXX in an internal meeting" is leaking confidential information, and as a result, all that information is going to be used for is sensational source-less tabloid articles.
Yes, people leave Google, but it's probably not due to cutbacks in perks or Search Plus Your World. It's probably, "I want to do something new!"
I misread the title and clicked expecting an argument about why Google thinks SPDY (http://www.chromium.org/spdy ) is vital to internets or something :(
I would be much more interested at working at the new Page dominated Google than the old Schmidt one. At least he's trying to do what Steve Jobs did so well: make big leaps forward.
Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.
It certainly would be nice if there was a real competitor to Google like Android competes with iOS.
Schmidt is the type of person that VCs/investors/financial firms like to see in charge. They feel more comfortable when level-headed, experienced executives are in charge of a company. Now that Google has risen to the top, they have more freedom to put the creative types in charge.
In most cases it seems companies either do small incremental improvements OR big leaps at roughly the same pace. Doing something bold doesn't have to take more time -- it just requires a lot more vision, effort, and balls.
"Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems."
This makes me really sad. It might be necessary, but you also miss out on a lot of innovation that happens when people can build off the work of others.
To steal your examples, would there be a market for the Mac or OS X if IBM had not licensed PC clones? Would there be Facebook/Twitter/GMail if the Internet had not been public-domain?
I don't think it's necessarily sad. Think how much better Ubuntu is because of OS X or how awesome it is that Android exists in its current form because of iOS.
Proprietary technology may even give back more to open technology than it takes.
I think it should be pointed out that both OS X and Android are based upon Linux. That point probably makes the discussion about who gives more to who a lot more complex.
Google search, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter are built on HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and PHP, which are all free and open source. The Internet would be a bunch of walled gardens if it were built on proprietary technology, and every one of those gardens would be orders of magnitude crappier than the Internet we have today. Apple products are great for the 10%-20% of the population that can afford them, but mostly irrelevant to the vast majority of people.
Ah yes... and everybody thought Google was immune to the tech company lifecycle. My guess is this is where the downslide begins (which will probably be decades for a company of Google's size).
I've seen this play out in small and large companies alike ... once the business model gets solidified and turns into a cash cow all the execs go into defense mode which manifest itself in a number of ways but my way or the highway is usually a big one.
Well in this case they're sacrificing their cash cow (search) for a social network that is optimistically 1/10th the size of Facebook. I would argue the precise opposite is happening here - SPYW represents an effort to innovate, and nobody is getting "complacent". Whether or not it's too radical is another story.
SPYW may have some hints of efforts toward innovation in search but its much more predominantly a defensive move by Google as was Google+ against leading social networks (obviously most notably Facebook and Twitter). Defensive moves are necessary and good in business terms but honestly when you start playing defense all the time your getting to be on the other side of the hill. Its just part of the natural evolution of successful companies.
I can't help but feel like this is the equivalent event of Ballmer throwing the chair.
It's good to have decent among a company so long as it is promoted in a healthy manner, having employees grumble about it at the water cooler only serves to infect the ranks but promoting an open forum where any person can decent and others can rebut allows people to at least understand why the decision where made. In some manner the conflict may be resolved for all parties through a unforeseen solution and by having a forum you promote solutioning. If I worked at Google I would be looking for the door, not because of the issue at hand but because when someone else is told to GTFO, I take it as a signal that it's probably time for me to go to because the open forum has died. It's sad really they where the Bell Labs of this time, a dream and people need dreams.
Thank You for the info, I have a very bad form of dyslexia (among some other related issues) which lent to early childhood issues, with spelling and English related subject, which to this day plague me when writing. As such I have to heavily rely on the spell checker. One of the reason I post is to keep my ability to write up to at least sub-par.
Bing has been doing a similar thing with Facebook for awhile haven't they? I'm not sure they could really make a large fuss without seeming entirely hypocritical. Of course I think Facebook and Twitter are a bit hypocritical for complaining about this while trying to charge Google for the data that would allow their products to be added successfully to SPYW.
Guys, unless you're actually a player, save yourself the headache and don't get caught up in this little valley tiff.
I think SPYW is dumb, but google is trying something to improve search results, it happens to use data that they have on the user. I don't think they need permission from everyone in the valley with a sign-in service they can't crawl before they're allowed to make changes that are meant to improve search. So all the bitching about it really smells like the big guys trying to SEO through telling google that they can't change their algorithm in a way that they lose rank.
“Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.”
-Larry Page, 2004
I think it is important to note that google is straying from their original mission, intentionally or not.
I assumed that I did not need to mark the post with <sarcasm/>.
What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose.
But the other part of the quote got me thinking - "...analogous to taking money for search results. "
I caught myself a few times this year that I'd prefer to pay for the premium quality content rather than have to wade through the soup of the ads mixed with semi-relevant results. So maybe therein lies some version of the future.
EDIT: of course, the rule "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance" still holds and it might be just an experiment that went a bit too far - I can not reproduce the "ads above the search results" on my browser right now.
That quote still rings true to me. Google still makes diddly squat even if you spent all day on their sites (besides YouTube). They still want you in and out. Google+ isn't about becoming a portal. Google saw the sheer amount of incredibly relevant data Facebook got from users who were glad to give it away. That data is the prize, not eyeballs (it would be hard to get more eyeballs that Google currently does). With Facebook-like data, Google's ad platform would nearly be unstoppable.
Of course, this is troubling in an entirely different manner. But at least Larry isn't a hypocrite.
And note what's at the top of almost any page of Google search results: paid ads (granted, they're in a different color, so you know they're ads, but they're still at the top of the page). Not so different a model.
It is important that they're straying, I'm not particularly happy with it myself, but thats a somewhat separate issue because I hardly think that the criticism they've been getting from their main tech competitors is altruistic concern that google stick to its principles.
Let's hope that the quote isn't true. There's nothing that signals "jumping the shark" better than arrogance and the sense of untouchability. It's almost cliche how people at their peak think they can say and do whatever they want without consequences.
A few decades from now, when someone writes up an HBS case study on Google, how will it read?
My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product.
Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do additional products, you can add a kind of clunky single-signon, whatever. Because at the end of the day, the user needs the thing you have that no one else does.
Now, Google had this. But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.
Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk, with plenty of equivalent nonsense in other verticals (hello, ebooks!).
So, already, Google took its eye off the ball for the one thing that previously had been inviolable. And now there's the comically titled SPYW.
Google's not stupid: they get that the rise of mobile and specialty apps/services that go with it are going to whittle away at the searches they'll be asked to do.
They've bet the company on Android and Google+ giving them an out. Android was a good call, as it puts them in the driver's seat for a lot of this mobile action. But they need the web, too. Can they get away with compromising their search with this nouveau portal strategy?
My hunch is that they're going to pay dearly in the process of finding out the answer is no. They're too big and too smart not to make the transition to whatever the next big thing is after search.
But boy – screwing with the golden goose that earns both reputation and cash?
Well, give 'em this: they're willing to take risks.
I disagree with your premise. The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data.
I'm a bit confused by the recent outcry about relevance. Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter?
It seems like a pretty clear strategy to me of simultaneously trying to grab as much social signal as possible by creating a meaningfully competitive social product, while also demonstrating to its competitors the value of allowing Google access to social signals.
I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
> The two previous "compromises" you cite are both examples of giving you what you want, instead of what you said you want. While your anecdotal data says that you are annoyingly misled by that, I'm sure there's a measure of selection bias there, and I'm sure Google has a lot more than anecdotal data.
You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. Adoption curves are led by early adopters. Do they really want to send the sort of person who was once a Google advocate into the arms of a competing service?
> I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
I don't think we actually disagree here. If Google does nothing, it's dead.
I'm just not sure that the something they've chosen to do is going to be a good idea. If they lose the plot on search, there's not much to fall back on. But, sometimes you do have to bet the farm.
You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.
We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.
I think we disagree on Google's legendary omniscience. Minimizing the years-long frustration I, and many I've talked to, have experienced because Google knows best is a hollow argument to me.
The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something.
As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious.
I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google.
Or maybe not. We'll see.
I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.
That seems like a perfectly reasonable point to collegially disagree on. I can't say that I have any special insight into what goes on inside Google, but contrary to your experience, I feel my search experience has generally gotten better. I doubt that Google at any point "did nothing" about search quality, but again, I have no special insight there. I do think that Google frantically doing something in opposition to a hostile SEOsphere can look like nothing, while in fact being a whole lot.
I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.
You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.
Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.
You said it. I'm reminded of a line from Stephenson's Snow Crash:
Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall... He turns off all the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
Google's big mistakes will be the best documented mistakes in human history, especially in retrospect when historians have sufficient time to sort the data from the chaff. But that doesn't mean the mistakes won't happen.
My experience matches yours. The synonyms and spelling corrections are tools that make my experience with google much better.
The issue, for me, continues to be the quality of the results. I still have a lot of issues with duplicate content polluting the results (particularly on programming related queries). I still have to dive a few pages deep way too often to find what I really want.
Although I've yet to find a competitor who consistently does better (or even as well).
The thing about social relevance is it has to still be relevant. Some of the examples out there, like linking to Google+ profiles that aren't updated vs twitter profiles that are, throw relevance right out the window in the favor of a “social” link.
In essence, if they can't get those social signals via fb or twitter, they simply shouldn't use them. Trying to build your own social network that is getting questionable traction (at least among the majority of the people I know), then using that network to judge search results, means that your search results suffer. Your social network has to be the one people are using before the social signals are actually useful and can be said to truly help with relevance.
That is the fundamental problem here, and unless the promotion of Google+ content results in better (not higher, because they've got plenty of accounts, but better) traction for that social network, then they're shooting result quality in the foot, if not directly in the head.
I agree that the social relevancy stuff is clearly not very good yet. But 1. I expect it to get better; and 2. Google faces a chicken-and-egg problem of not being able to extract meaningful signal from an unused social network, and a social network that no one will use, especially if it has no meaningful impact on search.
Bootstrapping the social product by funneling your actually successful product's users into it seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable approach to me. (I'd rather not get into an antitrust argument here, since that's been done to death, and I find it pretty uninteresting to begin with.)
I agree! Thank you for making this comment. Google is only doing what it must to compete in the social search market. Google has all the incentive to bring Facebook and Twitter directly into their search results, but Facebook and Twitter have the incentives to create silos. The only option was for Google to do it's own thing! Now Facebook and Twitter are just bitching and moaning about having some stiff competition.
> Google is only doing what it must to compete in the social search market.
But, is there really such a market? I remember reading a blog post from a FB employee (don't have the link at hand) saying that Google over-dramatized FB's willingness to go into search, be it "social search" or whatever. What brings people to FB, and more to the point, what makes them spending hours (literally) each day on that site is not their search feature (which I'd say is not that good) but the fact that everyone and everything has a profile or a page or something (yes, maybe even the stray-dog from around my building's corner that a lot of my neighbors feed regularly - try creating a page for him on Google+).
> Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter?
Let's say fb/twitter release a public api to access the social signals. So things like number of likes on a particular news page. In return, is google willing to release the data on number of clicks on a particular search result for all queries? Seems a bit hyprocritical no ?
Your comment is very confusing to me. If it's a public API, why would Google have to return anything?
And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure.
It seems like a fair deal to me, and for Twitter and FB to be complaining about lack of exposure when they're trying to charge for the data that would appropriately affect their ranking is what seems absurdly hypocritical to me.
search for mark zuckerberg in google. Which is the first social network page that shows up in the search ranking(ranked by google based on publicly available data and its own click-thru data). Why dont they just show that page rather than the google-plus page, whose rank is probably so low it doesn't even show up in the organic search first 10 pages...
I'm saying that the kind of click-thru data that google is asking for is private business-critical data. If google expects facebook/twitter to release that, that is akin to google being asked to release the click-data on all query/website combinations which forms the most critical signal in search ranking.
I'm saying it's fine for Twitter and FB to withhold that data. But they can't then complain about not being ranked fairly. Conversely, Google started off complaining about not getting access to FB and Twitter data. Then they shut up and made a competing product. FB and Twitter are free to do the same, but I think what Google has just showed is that it's a lot easier for Google to make a compelling social network than it is for FB or Twitter to make a compelling search engine. They're complaining because they're scared, and, quite frankly, they should be.
I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it.
What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them.
The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.
:) no data is being witheld ! Both facebook.com/zuck and plus.google.com/zuck are public pages. As with all other docs in google's index, they should just use signals like click-data to decide which page shows up. This has nothing to do with private data or not getting access. That's just all PR bullshit.
Normal ranking algorithms apply normally. Social networking profiles have extra data, you know, like social activity and social graph, that Google doesn't have access to. The pages you're talking about already show up and are ranked normally like all other pages. G+ pages show up higher because they have a lot of extra google juice from social signals. Those are the ones Twitter and FB are complaining about.
Disclaimer 1: I work for Twitter.
Disclaimer 2: Not a twitter spokesperson, opinions are my own.
I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked.
If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.
It is true that Google rated them on top for 'Organic' results, but the use of following someone on Google+ is not just that you want to see what they publish (use it just like a social network). There is more to it, what they +1 and share has direct effect on how things are ranked for you in later queries. This information is not available for other cases - not realtime/easily anyways. (Twitter closed their hose, Facebook is tricky to parse and their APIs are incredibly slow!).
Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google.
Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?
It won't happen overnight, but this could be trouble for Google. If it was still Google vs. Yahoo, it would be no contest, but Bing is nipping at their heels (at least in terms of search quality) and is actually pretty damn good.
Isn't Bing also including social signals in personalizing their search results? If so, neither of them are just sticking to the task of being a simple search engine like we knew and loved years ago.
Where, you typed a word, that looks convincingly like another word had been misspelled, but in fact is correctly spelled - but has synonyms that you want to look for?
It's not about a single search satisfying all of those properties. I'm just saying I want them all as defaults: that is to say, I don't find it reasonable that I should have to go find the search options page and turn verbatim search off every time I'm about to make a search where synonyms might be helpful, and turn it on again every time I'm about to make a search which might be autocorrected.
...so, if you type something where synonyms might be helpful, it should automatically use synonyms...
...but, sometimes you want to type something that looks like it should be autocorrected, but you want it to not autocorrect it...
...and it's not enough that you can do these things - you want them to happen automatically?
I'm sorry, but that is not "a search tool that does what you ask for," that's MAGIC that you want.
If you think a search engine exists that does this better, please tell us all about it, because I think it would be an example of an intelligent machine, in the Turing Test sense.
I certainly can tell you about it, because robrenaud directed me to one in this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3508005. I have just tested it and it does exactly what I asked for.
Add &nfpr=1 to your queries to disable full page replacement. You can trick your browser to doing this for you if you use the search bar by setting a custom search engine with that parameter.
Regarding your first complaint, I find that 90% of the time the suggestion for a different spelling is in fact the search I wanted. The 10% of cases where I was searching for something obscure do stick out in my mind more, but I'm OK with that. They've optimized for the common case, typos, which is a win overall. I haven't noticed any extraordinary synonym replacements myself, though, the stem's always been the same...
I hope their search quality improves. I understand it's an arms race with spammers, and they do give a lot of value for free minus ads. I guess I'm so attuned to identifying bad results by now that I haven't noticed much variability in results quality. But echo-chamber curation doesn't feel right, and the feel is important.
Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it is so fast - you can select the search you want. It's tab-completion for the web. And it can be informative in itself, if you aren't sure of the right terms. (i.e. the deep search problem of not knowing what you are looking for).
I think they are doing a great job of searching for what you want - which is their goal. Technically precise searches aren't their main goal (though I wish they retained it somewhere).
However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? EDIT ok, the evidence is explicit and damning: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.phpEDIT2 ok, I'm not getting the results they claim, at all. I'm using "google.com" but from Australia. Maybe that's why.
However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now?
I think the notion of objectivity in search is a fallacy, and I would hesitate to characterize the addition of social search as artificial inflation, at least not any more artificial than any other part of the algorithm. The fact is: Google has more information about how to rank G+ profiles than any other profiles. That extra information adds google juice. Yes, other social networking profiles are indexed and ranked, but Google doesn't have the appropriate extra information on them that it does wrt G+.
This doesn't seem particularly hard to understand, and I'm not sure how the focusontheuser.org bookmarklet illuminates the issue. I agree that the G+ profiles are probably given too much weight, and that's probably for two reasons: 1. It's brand new and requires more data for calibration; 2. It props up G+ as a product.
From Google's perspective, even if search quality is negatively impacted in the short term while they calibrate and funnel users into G+, as long as in the long term search quality is bolstered by the additional subsequent data, it's a win.
Yes, I agree that social search can improve accuracy, and that google knows more about its own social information so it can use it more accurately.
Artificially inflating that, for the purpose of pushing their product, is the problem (that's how I'd define "artificial ranking" - ranking on a basis other than returning a page of search results for the user). This avoids the problematic term "objective".
I don't buy the "means to an end" argument. If google really is doing that, it means worse search results, loss of user confidence, and antitrust litigation (abuse of market power).
BTW: the first search example "people and places" seems to require a google+ account (as it wouldn't give me results unless I signed up). I'm happy for a google+ search to yield google+ results.
I am not sure about the "antitrust litigation" claim you make. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Google. There are tons of old search engines and new ones coming up every year. This is very different than having a computer where Windows is installed by default, instead of having the choice of your OS.
It's like saying Facebook is also "abusing its market power" because it only shows you contacts on Facebook and not on Google+. Sorry, but this cannot work this way, when you are on one network, you agree with the principles of that network, or you use another. There's no lack of options out there.
I was thinking of antitrust suits for abuse of market-power. i.e. not about how you got it, but what you do with it. So the analogy is microsoft using their market-power to bundle their media player. BTW Bill Gates thought as you did, that this was perfectly legitimate.
Your point about alternative search engines, and Windows being hard to avoid, is relevant for another kind of antitrust.
Aside: though, I think google is still far and away the best, in terms of response time (especially for predicting search queries as you type - that requires huge local data centres all over the world). e.g. Duck duck go has great features, but it's just too slow (at least, over here in Australia). Who can afford data-centres everywhere? (maybe Amazon...) Google also has one of the strongest brands in the world. So, the choice is kind of figurative. It's an earned monopoly, not earned through abuse, not bad or wrong; but a monopoly nonetheless.
On Microsoft, (to close the loop), I think it is legitimate for them to include the software they want with Windows (such as IE, media player and all), however it is not normal that hardware manufacturers sell you computers only bundled with Windows and nothing else. That is where the abuse is, for this case.
I think the term "abuse of market power" has very thin legal ground. Anything that becomes popular tend to appear like it "abuses" its power. That's usually what competitors say when they simply give up competiting: they use lawyers and politicians to weaken the leader.
What matters in the end is what value the service provides, and if there is choice available for users to turn to other alternatives. If Google does not provide value anymore (irrelevant results) it will consumers/users in the end, and that will spark demand for better alternatives. The market will adjust. I do not really see an issue with the current situation.
Regarding search engines, Bing and Yahoo may not be as relevant but they also do the job most of the time. There will be new competitors coming, web contents are changing, the way people use the web are changing, all this environment creates opportunities to challenge search on the way. Looking through pages of results of links is hardly something that can be optimal over the long term - we will need better tools, I have no doubt about that.
I was saying it means antitrust litigation; you're saying it shouldn't. :-)
Yes, change may bring new competitors that could upset google - disruption seems the destiny of most tech companies, it's just a matter of time. Interestingly, what we're seeing right now is a valiant effort on Google's part to shift from pagerank to "social-rank", in response to facebook, a new competitor. Going by history (as in "The Innovator's Dilemma", google as the incumbent will succeed if the technological innovation serves their business model - which it does.
That's incorrect. The hardcoded Google+ results in the "People and Pages" box, as well as the other two hardcoded locations outlined on this page (http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php), appear for all Google users -- whether or not they have a Google+ profile, and even whether or not they're logged into Google. You can see that in this video, which is conducted in a Chrome incognito window in logged-out Google: http://www.focusontheuser.org/video.php
If you're not seeing the Google+ results on some pages, it's just because Google is still in the process of rolling out the feature.
Google's search tweaks are making it better and better for most users. For me, though, I want the old simple-minded Google back. I would rather get what I ask for, even when when it's garbage in/garbage out, than wonder if some heuristic somewhere is filtering out the pages I want to see.
For example, I'm sure Google "knows" that I am a monolingual English speaker, but I can read enough German, French, and Spanish to struggle through a blog post telling me how to diagnose or work around a problem with my computer when that's my only choice. (Especially now that Chrome will run the whole thing through Google Translate for me.) I set an option in Google to show me pages in other languages, but these days I don't see non-English results anymore unless there are only a few pages of search results. It seems like non-English pages are penalized heavily, regardless of how high they rank as search results. (Or did everyone who used to post about technical topics in German switch to English over the last five years?)
Even if that's not true, the fact that I even think about it is a bother. I wish Google would be more simple-minded so I could have more confidence in how I understand the results.
> Google Search automatically returns results in the language you choose for Google product text, but you can also request results in many other languages.
Try setting German at "For Google text" (first on language preference page). I did, and got several german hits. Whereas, merely adding "german" for the search results (second on language preferences page) didn't add any.
It's a hassle, but a solution is to change your "For Google text" setting. for each language you want.
It seems to me that the vastly greater number of english results would simply out-weigh the german resuls. The german results will still be there, but ranked much lower.
What's curious to me is that you say Google didn't formerly do this. Maybe they changed the weighting of the various languages from being equal to being weighted according to the results.
Probably searching with german terms will get german results, but again a hassle because you have to do it for each language.
EDIT following guelo's comment on "verbatim" under "All Results -> More Search Tools" on the left hand side, there's also a "Translated foreign pages" option. This gave me several results in other languages. Sounds like what you want.
BONUS: I noticed a "Search English and German pages" just under "Search the web" on the left hand side (I added German as a search language above). I think this is precisely what you wanted.
Really? All that to get what I used to get for free? Not to mention that German is just one language, and "translated foreign pages" sounds like it might search the translated text, which is nice, unless it doesn't deliver results in untranslated pages, which leaves me wondering whether Google translates all pages or just some, and whether it's sufficiently integrated with Google Translate to filter out words that can't be translated, which are often exactly the words I want. That puts me right back where I started, sitting in front of Google wondering how the hell it works and what it's filtering out of the internet as a result.
Wow, I go to some trouble to research your question for you, but you reply in complaint without trying it out. e.g. try it with more than one language selected for search. You can also test your questions with specific queries (e.g. using terms that seem unlikely to be translated). Also, consider that you didn't know what results Google wasn't returning in the first place, years ago (e.g. by not having indexed them).
Google aims at working without thought. But it can only do so for one target audience, and unfortunately for technically minded folk, that target has to be mainstream users. Fortunately, technical folk are usually curious to explore and customize technology.
EDIT just confirmed that it does use added search languages, as expected. e.g. if I add german and french, it provides: "Search English and French and German pages" Note: I'm not doing this for you; but because I'm curious.
To be absolutely clear, I'm complaining about Google, not you, and I already said Google's behavior is better for most users. I'm not really sure what more I can say to be "nice" and still be honest, because I am angry that I was missing search results because of a behind-the-scenes change that I would only have discovered if I was regularly checking my preferences to see if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted. And that's what I found: when they created this settings page they erased whatever language settings I had (which I think was just "yes, I would like to see languages other than English") and left only English selected.
Honestly, you shouldn't be so sensitive that you perceive criticism of a web app as criticism of your advice, or assume that I didn't check up on it. I just wasn't happy about what I found. Per my first post, all I want is to be able to use Google and understand roughly what it's doing, and it failed very badly in this case, since the one thing I was counting on it to do -- include foreign language pages, because I asked it to -- was actually the thing it wasn't doing.
You can add more than one language. If you'd checked up on it, you would have seen that. I perceive this as complaining about advice without following it, and I find it annoying.
If you're still angry (and it sounds legitimate, especially if there was a subtle hint of a problem, but not enough to register fully), that explains where you're coming from, which puzzled me.
Aside: Unfortunately with webpages/webapps, they can and do get updated continuously, without explicit version changes or any notification at all. Ideally, all changes would be back-compatible, but then you end up with a mess (both in user interface and implementation). Continuous notifications amounts to spam, and is usually ignored (I do). Change is a problem. I'm not sure there's a solution.
I think back-compatibility is a deep, abiding, practical problem, in general.
EDIT "if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted": just realized this is more than merely "backcompatibility of UI". In effect, they have destroyed your data. Although that sounds overdramatic, since the data itself is very minor (perhaps one bit, a binary checkbox), it's a clear trigger for notification. There might be some grey area for when your configuration is still there, but has a different meaning - but I think you're saying that your config is no longer there, and/or no longer has an effect.
I used to use Yahoo finance, and they had a nice display of 9 user-configured stocks at the top. In their latest redesign, this disappeared, and I couldn't find an option to bring it back. This was enough to make me spurn their product, and switch to google finance. It makes me think they have no idea what they are doing. I guess in this case, I had notification (as I could see it was gone). But if they had an explicit reference to it going away, even if it said "sorry, this is going away", I would feel better about it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe it is still available somewhere, and I just couldn't find it.
So, changing the meaning of a user-specified configuration should probably trigger an explicit notification (and force the implementer to consider it); and deleting user-specified configuration should never happen, even if it has no effect. I think it should be treated as sacrosanct as other data stored (e.g. gmail emails, dropbox files etc). If changes render it ineffective, it should still be there, but with a notice: "this no longer works, use this instead". Again, this forces the implementer to thin about what they are doing.
Not sure why I thought I couldn't respond to you directly, but I deleted the other comment and moved it here where it belongs:
Re the "just one language" thing, I can imagine I'm not making sense, because I'm not really communicating the context of how irrationally enraged I am over this. The truth is that I only enabled a couple of languages because I was just too angry and frustrated to enable the rest. I know it doesn't make any rational sense, but my reptile brain is telling me that goddammit, Google is not going to make me click on fifty little boxes just to fix them erasing my preferences. Not today. Not this user. There is a part of the brain that is trained to recognize when someone is jerking you around or abusing you, and when it gets triggered inappropriately, it is impossible to turn off. (I'm sure anyone who has worked in customer service will recognize what I'm talking about. Right now I am the bug-eyed paranoid who is convinced they are intentionally screwing with me for their own amusement.) So long story short, yes, it seems immensely important to me that I have to check fifty boxes instead of one, and I still don't have my unfiltered search results, not until I calm down enough to go click on all those boxes.
As for the problem of change, I can sympathize with the problem they face. I'm sure that globally minimizing user confusion and frustration is one of their goals. As for me personally, they'll have to count me in the "used the product incorrectly for years without realizing it and is now very angry about it" category.
UPDATE: EVEN ANGRIER:
So I swallowed my pride and went to work clicking.
So unless there's another way to turn off language filtering, Google will filter out every language besides your primary language and seven others. (Yeah, your interface language counts as one of the eight.)
That's terrible. Even without Google Translate, I swear I got useful information from a page in Polish once. Plus there are pictures, video, miscategorized pages, mixed-language pages (what happens with those?) and the simple coolness of finding out that someone in Vietnam is using an open-source library you committed a patch to. And of course, Google freakin' Translate! Unless Google is translating every single page it crawls. Which it might be -- that's something to think about. But it does very poorly with some pairs of languages, and if it filters out every term it can't translate, then it will tend to filter out commands and symbols. And here I am speculating about how it works again, which goes back to my original point.
With my track record today, I'm sure I'll find out I'm misinterpreting this somehow, but I'm starting to feel a little bit justified in my anger. Ah, I can't lie. I feel much less angry now that I feel like less of a fool :-)
HN disables the reply button on long threads, for a period of time which increases with the length of the thread.
This is to discourage back-and-forth arguments and to give people time to cool down. (You can circumvent it by clicking "link"; a reply box appears beneath.)
I'm with you on the inappropriately triggered jerking-me-round neuron. I am definitely there from time to time :-). You put it well. When in that state, I don't really believe that someone in the real world is messing with me - but inside my world, I believe someone is. I think that I can't quite see the real world in that state (or don't want to). Funny thing is, if I find out someone is messing with me, I also feel less angry...
Oh man, that's awful. And that "limited to 8" dialog pops up for each checkbox. Seems a really badly designed interface in general. I wonder why the limit? Maybe they keep languages separate, because effective pagerank criteria differ across languages/cultures; and they're limiting internal bandwidth needed to combine the results from distant databases.
I was going to say you could just include the languages you can read (and where you often found useful info before); but I appreciate your point about seeing the whole web (I guess, the www), across languages.
I've had a play with google translate, and I noted that untranslated words seem to pass through, unaltered (using the text-based one, eg: http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20n... ) You could probably see by trying example pages til you find a word it doesn't know. It seems much more useful to include an untranslated word than to omit it, so hopefully they do it that way.
Given the 8 limit, this seems the best option for seeing the whole web - and if the translation is any good at all, it might be better. I might try this (though I recall reading something that I didn't notice was auto-translated, and after reading for a while, suddenly becoming aware that I had no idea what it meant...)
I wonder if just plain more information about a situation reduces anger, because anger relies on one's internal view of the world? The more acquainted we get with the real world, the harder it is to sustain anger. (Aside: The Buddhists say all negative emotion is based on ignorance or misconception - of seeing something as 100% absolutely negative - and so negative emotion can be reduced by deeper understanding.)
I faced the same problem. I am fluent in 4 languages and can work my way on a few others. But the problem is not that it's limited to an arbitrary number of languages. The problem is that it doesn't feel anymore like what I'm getting back from any query is the full web.
I seldom make spelling mistakes. I'd estimate that easily 95% of Google's "suggestions" are incorrect in my use case; and having to put the problematic word in quotes, rather than merely prepending a '+', is an editing chore.
The one thing that annoys me most these days, however, is that it also searches for "bike" when I type "motorbike"; I get endless irrelevant results about cycling in many longer queries. I recall other search engines in the past implementing cluster-based analysis to disambiguate homographs (with user selection on the SERP), but Google still isn't clever enough to fully figure out how "bike" means something different on motorbike-related pages than on cycling-related pages.
The search quality team loves to get specific examples of search results that you don't find helpful. If you are getting low quality results the best thing you can do is send them feedback.
There's little incentive in filling out a form that disappears into the ether. Given that Google's other web-based support tools are mostly useless and unanswered (Gmail support for example), this is not much an incentive to waste time filling out another form and likely getting no reply whatsoever.
I know that the search quality team loves getting specific examples of bad search results. I know this both from talking to them and from seeing how they interact with people on forums (HN in particular :-) )
I don't work on search quality, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you send specific examples to the search quality team, either through the feedback form, or some other means - heck send it to Matt Cutts - it will be looked at and used to improve search quality.
The more specific you can be, the better.
"Searches for bikes suck for me" isn't very useful :-)
"When I enter the query 'blah blah blah', the following urls (url1, url2, url3, ...) are completely irrelevant to me." Even better, say why you think the urls are irrelevant.
If you submit reports like this, I can promise you that the search quality team will take them seriously and will praise your name (if possibly only internally :-) )
Just to confirm what you say about Google trying to be too smart I just searched for "SPYW" because to be honest I have no idea what is that word or abbreviation. So Google decided that I am searching for the word SPYWare and I was no able to find a definition for SPYW. That's why I am reading the comments in case I can guess what it is.
it's simple! You just need to search "define: spyw"
Definition for spyw:
Web definitions:
(SPYWS) Stroke Prevention in Young Women Study.
www.health.am/acronyms/s7/
you're welcome!
(edit: to be fair though, the first link is a good one and explains the whole situation)
(edit 2: oh wait! That's because of my personal search results. This is too funny)
Even if this was the case, the little of this article gives you enough info to google "SPYW google" which is even more likely to get what you want. Personally the second result down for me was on this topic for your search.
The thing is that Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year.
But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating.
Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.
I think Digg is an excellent comparison. Putting paid ads in the stream of Diggs basically killed them dead.
Then they had to start pretending that things had more upvotes than they really did, which made it worse.
The place ghetto-ised in a scarily quick fashion.
I'm not sure though how much the earlier 'Digg-revolts' over senselessly mucking around with the UI contributed. Had they already destroyed or eroded a lot of the goodwill of their users?
Personally I believe the problem started back when they decided to boot Apple stories off the front page, and twiddled their algorithm to achieve it. Yes, Windows fanboys hated seeing those stories popping up all the time, and would go in and troll the Apple fans something chronic (and then complain that it was justified because the Apple users were doing the same thing - even though they weren't)... but doctoring the results like that just meant that what was (at that time) basically one of the few IT companies doing new and interesting things, instead of just being a "me too" copycat.
Digg had plenty of competitors, even when they were at their peak. Arguably Google clearly has the best product, and they have become synonymous with searching the Internet.
But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.
I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results.
For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want.
Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.)
Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data.
Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW.
Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more.
I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway.
You honestly feel that the Matt Cutts article about seeing his werewolf photo benefits search results? You are definitely in the minority. Look at the comments.
EDIT: Never mind. Didn't know you are a Googler. of course you agree with Matt Cutts. :)
I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.
The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications.
There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) that don't pretend to have lofty corporate values. Yet we keep buying their products and they keep making assloads of money. That's the way it is.
There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple)
Speak for yourself... there are plenty of us who cheerily invite Apple to go straight to hell. You can certainly count me among their number, for one.
I have no use whatsoever for their anti-hacker ethos, their locked-down, proprietary, "no user repairable parts inside" attitude, and the arrogance with which they presume to know more about what the customer needs, than the customer does.
I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.
That's hardly a settled point. There's evidence on both sides of the argument, to this day.
Honestly, from my point of view, just myself counts as "plenty" in this context. But I'm pretty sure the number is actually higher than that. Just count up all the F/OSS ideologues who refuse to use closed-source / proprietary software as a matter of principle, for starters. And I'm guessing there are a handful of folks who don't count themselves as total GNU hippies, but still prefer to shy away from companies that sell products based around such a locked-down, proprietary, closed-off ethos.
Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week.
I never said they weren't successful... I'm just saying that not everybody buys into their bullshit or likes their shitty proprietary products, that's all.
> I never said they weren't successful... I'm just saying that not everybody buys into their bullshit or likes their shitty proprietary products, that's all.
...So you've chosen to swallow someone else's bullshit line then instead? That's way better.
Not everyone has the same fundamental values, you know. I value freedom, hackability and openness over the kinds of things that Apple fanboys seem to prize. That doesn't make anybody wrong or right, or either option better or worse; it just reflects the underlying truth that we don't all value the same things.
Right, but I didn't say the products you like are shitty now did I? What you like isn't bullshit. Your overly aggressive opinion on Apple is what's bullshit. Anyone with a reasoned opinion would never brand Apple's products as shitty. They might not like some of the philosophy behind them, but they aren't bad products in any light.
We may not all value the same things, that doesn't mean we need to be deliberately ignorant about the appeal others see in a product.
> I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.
The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications.
...Huh?
You appear to be replying to me, but I'm puzzled by what you've typed. Who mentioned anything about values? This is about ruining a core product's user experience and the repercussions of any strategy that allows that.
I think that their "dont be evil motto" played crucial role in their PR and popularity. Net was new back then, google was tapping into new areas, collecting info on every search you do, everywhere you go. they needed their DBE slogan. IT was rather a PR genius than an amateurish marketing.
> And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.
This is my perception of how Google evolved:
In the early days, it used to be like running grep on the whole internet but getting your results sorted by a very relevant algorithm (page rank). Then over the years they added a lot of features that fell into three categories:
* operators to run more powerful queries
* adding more complexity to the sorting of the results (localization, penalizing websites trying to game the algorithm, ...)
* adding widgets given the query (ups tracking, weather, calculator, ...)
These were all good, and I loved the fact that you could run some very clever and complex queries to get exactly what you wanted (and the googledorks were born...).
But recent improvements to Google have all been about "guessing what the user wants" (the best illustration of that is the search as you type) and while it's hard to argue about the validity of this approach my problem with it is that it won't give me any fallback options when it guesses wrong.
To be honest, Google does a very good job at guessing what I want. But the frustration caused by the few times it doesn't get it just makes me miss the "old google".
And with every new recent improvement I keep being reminded of the MentalPlex [1]
Totally agree, and this whole thread allowed me to understand very clearly my gripes about the evolution of google search.
I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches, very local results for everyday related searches.
And these expectations might change depending on any random factor.
I don't think google can weasel out what I want in what context. And I don't feel like adjusting dozens of options everytime I do a different kind of search.
Before google started making search smarter, the burden was on my shoulder to do the work to get relevant results for my queries. Now that the algorithms do more and more assumptions, I get to fight with it more and more, and before the blame lies on my search skills, it goes to google for making it hard.
My solution was to use separate engines (including multiple instance of the same ones, like ncr, US only, jp only etc), but a fast a dumb engine is really the way to go.
I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.
Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here's where you're mistaken. Google is only compromising the relevancy of their results for a few months. After that, with such a strong (unethical) promotion, Google Plus results will be THE most relevant, because users have switched to it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So instead of commending the CEO on articulating a vision and being determined about it the author somehow spins the words to fit the Google bashing theme of her previous posts.
To be clear: "This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" != “Fuck off”.
There is plenty that could be said about the sad state of tech blogging but some of the blame falls on Google because they are losing the PR battle. It’s obvious that PR staff from Twitter/Facebook and others are doing a much better job at selling their rhetoric to these tech blogs, specially to the newly formed blogs looking for audience and traffic.
The disturbing thing is that people here at news.yc -- hopefully a fairly informed bunch -- seemingly aren't able to see past the infuriatingly self-serving nature of a "Don't Be Evil Toolbar" created by "Facebook & Twitter" employees. And, Facebook, which happily used its dominance in social to lock out users from bulk-exporting contacts during the Google+ launch now complains that Google is leveraging its dominance in search?
OP: I'd be really interested to hear your take on why tech blogging is so pro-Apple/Twitter/FB and anti-Google. I have no connection to Google but it seems to me that Google is by far doing the most good in the world compared to the other 3 (Although Twitter has also done good things during e.g. the Arab Spring).
I think the problem is that people feel forced into agreeing with Google's decisions when they don't, and people don't like being forced into doing something. As an example, say you won't use Google+ because you don't like their account naming policies. That's fine, don't visit plus.google.com, don't use it, and it doesn't exist to you. But when Plus results start appearing in search, a product that you like, you are reminded of a community you can't participate in. This leads to resentment for search, because it is reminding you that you aren't getting the same service that everyone else is.
Facebook, on the other hand, is very easy to ignore. I killed my account there several years ago and haven't really thought about Facebook since, since Facebook is nothing but a social network and I'm not really a big social networking guy.
I think that's what's going on here.
(I would say, "people are worried that there will only be one provider for XXX", where XXX is mail or search or chat or whatever, but I know that's not true. People did not mind AOL or Windows or the three big banks, so I doubt they really care that Google is "the only game". Slashdot users hate monopolies, but I'm not sure the average consumer cares.)
I like Google+ and SPYW, so I can only speculate. But, since I work for Google, it's important to me to be able to understand what complaints users have about our products.
Honestly my only complaint would be that Google as a company needs a human face. And when I say that, it's important to note that it took me a couple minutes to think of it.
People frequently dislike change, and so I'm pleased that a major company such as Google has the will to change and improve it's services. But they not only improve their services, which is good for their bottom line, but also releases a lot of their work and research which helps others.
Google+ is close to blackmail. Read what Rand from seomoz has written about it [1:2] (example quote: "[...] if SPYW continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it's been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers"). Google is using their dominance in search to create side benefits for using google+: you get your picture in organic results and massively increased clickthrough, amongst other benefits, by putting your content into google+ and playing the + game. This is a step past seo: seo was optimizing for google's algo, but now google's ranking algo forces you to push and likes/pluses content into their system. So once your competitors start using it, you have to as well.
Also, as you pointed out, I dislike social and dislike that products like that continue to intrude into my search results.
How do you feel about non-social things in your search results, like maps or videos? If pictures are a big deal in SEO, it seems like everyone would be communicating via video. Ultimately, I think relevancy is what "converts" people.
Also, I don't get the big push on "SEO". Just buy an ad and now you're above all the organic results anyway.
Regarding SEO: The Facebook "Like" button for instance has been embeddable on any page for awhile now and affects results for FB searches, ads, etc. So people have been playing the "Facebook Like" game alongside generalized SEO for awhile now and have not found it terribly difficult. In fact the "+1" is pretty much a clone of the "Like" button, so what's novel here?
Anything a capitalistic company does is self-serving. I'm using, and liking, the "don't be evil" thing because it makes my search results better rather than worse.
Am I the only one that thinks SPYW is the right direction? We have seen that rankings were increasingly being gamed. Algorithmic search is a never ending arms race. SPYW aligns with what google has been trying to do for a while, provide results that are relevant and worthwhile to the user. If my mom searches for digital cameras , she would rather have a link to something written on G+ by someone in her circle than a blurb on a content farm.Algorithmic search is a no win situation, there is no way to judge the value of the link, they need to do that through +1 and other social features. It is just wisdom of crowds.
Ideally wouldn't it find the best result? G+ and farm.* seem equally likely to be poor. I did an image search for something like Empire State Building and my G+ results showed first. The results sucked.
I honestly don't know if it g+ will give better results for all searches or even any searches. When I search for "digital camera" the G+ results I get are people I know talking about cameras and sharing links about cameras.I think that is better than blog spam and content farms.
My main point was without something like +1 they are in a never ending arms race, they needed to disrupt that cycle of tweeks and return to status-quo.
Definitely better than blog spam and content farms, but I was hoping those weren't my only options :-) I would like the highest signal content for the aspect of digital cameras I'm interested in, regardless of source. Using G+ as a mechanical proxy for relevance makes sense of course, but I don't think it gives the best results. I faced this what looking up coffee makers too. There are these search ruts you just can't get out of.
Ideally wouldn't it find the best result? G+ and farm.* seem equally likely to be poor. I did an image search for something like Empire State Building and my G+ results showed first. The results sucked.
Meta: Throwing the new terms as SPYW around as if they have been around for at least for decade I believe is wrong. At first I thought its some kind of certificate, or even some kind of vaccination.
I'm seeing a whole lot of hyperbole around here for what still seems to be pretty much a non-issue. Don't like SPYW? Don't use it. It's one button. Click it, and move on. Between the Don't Be Evil script stunt from facebook/twitter and the content-free blogspam from Sarah Lacy/pandodaily, it seems like there are a few people out there who really, really want this to be an issue.
Facebook's ongoing record is one of introducing opt-out products that harm user privacy. This is just a matter of preference. Nobody is hurt by SPYW, and it's far easier to disable than many of facebook's updates.
The issue with Facebook's changes to privacy was not that they are opt-out, but that they were opt-out and significantly impacted user privacy. Opt-out services on their own may be annoying, but they aren't a cause for alarm unless it hurts the user.
Google also has an ongoing PR problem with regard to privacy, with Eric Schmidt (sp? the recently ex-ceo dude) going on record as saying he doesn't believe in privacy.
Facebook at least pretends to care about privacy and then screws the user, whereas Google just skips to step B
The data liberation thing is about adding data to Google, or copying the data out of Google so other services can use it. I may be wrong, but I have not seen anything that says you can use it to actually delete the information from Google's servers (if I'm wrong, please show me).
Doesn't facebook usually do it in regard to rather important privacy settings? Google's is more of a default search filter you can just turn off, no? I clicked the SPYW off the first day I saw it and haven't given it much thought since.
One reason Facebook's opt-out policy has annoyed people in the past is that it is rarely one click - the opt-out is usually buried deep within user settings, and generally users haven't been alerted to the fact that anything has changed to require them to opt-out.
If you're signed in, click the gear in the top-right. It's under settings or preferences or whatever the option they give you is. Scroll down a bit, and turn it off permanently.
300 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadFor me it tends to fail on very specific queries and then I use it's Google Bang to just have it redirect me to Google. But it's as good as Google for my typical queries.
I use Mail.app w/ GMail over IMAP and have no problems. I could switch to any other provider of course, but see no reason to do so as accessing GMail over IMAP doesn't have any of this social crap associated with it. Unfortunately, on Windows I'm forced to use gmail.com as no desktop client comes even close to Mail.app's fully integrated and optimized IMAP support. Outlook's IMAP support is STILL blocking/synchronous for most operations, hanging the entire software while it syncs headers or sends items to be erased. Thunderbird is as clunky as ever.
Google is the only one left, then. I used DDG for a while, but I think they need to step up their game with regards to simplifying the UI (i.e. remove the attempts at finding the info you're looking for for you or at least provide an option to disable this) and speed up both page serves and queries, w/ geodistributed caching, etc.
Or you could just use Google SSL, but disable all cookies for that domain.
I had previously self hosted (a pain), and then used google apps with my own domain. That was when google apps had no google groups or other integration at all, and it was cumbersome to have two google accounts (no multiple login then either). So I switched to plain gmail. Certainly less work and the bonus of being able to tell people 'blah blah at gmail dot com' and not having to spell it out every time someone asked for it cannot be understated.
My needs have changed a bit though, and being able to retain my email/domain should I choose to change providers again has become more important. In addition, I no longer use the gmail web interface, opting instead to use sparrow over imap. An unlikely shift back to client centric computing even while more and more of my other services are shifting away!
[1]: http://fastmail.fm/help/overview_features.html
Search, I still find myself using google from time to time, but my default search is duckduckgo, this is greatly helped due to the fact that it's simple to search from google instead by simply adding !g to the search, additionally, you can do similar things for !gmaps !gimages !bing, this feature alone makes ddg a trivially better google replacement for default search.
Now, a decent replacement for the gmail client, I haven't been able to find something satisfactory web-based, or even as a desktop app. I use thunderbird for work emails, but it seems to be a little... lacking.
Chat: IRC/AIM/Yahoo/etc - just grab something with a libpurple backend.
Search: DuckDuckGo most of the time, Google otherwise.
http://ycombinator.com/ad.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martindavidsson/96160482
(edit) Why am I at -1? Balmer is a more reasonable match for Bill, but he is not a founder. Jobs is a better fit, but it is odd to see him paired with Gates.
*except almost all the ones that get talked about here every day.
I've been under the impression that the few that have had successful exits were bought by Google itself, mostly as talent acquisitions.
Among startups we've funded, I know at least Greplin, Optimizely, Appjet, and ReMail have/had founders who previously worked at Google. I'm sure there are at least that many more, but I don't remember where most of the people we funded worked before.
I guess Biz Stone came directly from Google to found Twitter.
Given Google's size and the quality of the people who go in there, I'd have expected dozens if not hundreds of companies to be spawned by ex-Googlers.
I often wonder if certain companies simply produce more founders because of culture, money or simply bias in who they hire. PayPal is the classic example of a company that pumped out a good number of successful founders, but I can't identify any particular characteristic of that particular company that might have caused it.
I'd love to see some analytics about where the most successful or prolific founders come from.
Google may have very good technical people, i.e. they are capable, but I am not sure how they would fare as "leaders", "influencers", etc... it's also a company culture thing. If your company does not promote that kind of behavior, it is very unlikely you will see people stepping out to try things on their own. And if Google is successful at making their employees happy in some way or another, that also puts the barrier of leaving Google to a much higher point.
I've known plenty of really sharp, talented developers that have zero interest in ever even looking at a P&L sheet.
When you've immersed yourself in a certain sub-culture (say startups), it's sometimes easy to forget that not everyone out there shares that model of thinking.
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dodgeball
Anyway, I'm an ex-Googler who started a company after leaving. It's still too early to say whether we'll be "successful" by any metric, but I'm really enjoying it so far, which is enough for now.
Largely depends, I suspect, on the level of VC involvement. Most (all?) would be looking for a big-money exit in the future- just ticking along nicely means their bet doesn't pay off so well.
It took me quite a while to come to this conclusion though and I still wonder if I'm missing something obvious. :-)
They're still in beta so perhaps it's premature to call it a success story, but it looks promising.
Larry certainly does seem to have take Steve Jobs admonishment to heart. Which can give a company tremendous focus. Its an interesting time.
I used to remind people at the Googleplex that they were walking around in SGI's tomb. I found that was rarely appreciated :-)
So here is that challenge for this decade: Leave Google and kill Hollywood. Seems like a reasonable goal to me.
Now, if you google SPYW on Bing then it's nowhere to be found, and that's ultimately why I continue to use Google for search regardless of whatever nonsense they put in the side bar.
You don't "google" on bing, you "bing it".
http://www.bing.com/search?q=SPYW
> Jan 13, 2012 · Summary: Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW) announcement has ruffled some feathers. Both Facebook and Twitter have reacted ...
I've been banging the "Bing needs to do so much better to make even a tiny dent" drum for a while now, but they've made strides in the past 6 months.
I didn't find a relevant result at all (I searched the first 3 pages - didn't bother going further).
Bing may be improving - I hear Bing Maps is pretty good - but the search is not even close.
Looks the same as it did for me a few hours ago when I searched on it, and duck duck go uses bing search.
I see definitions in the extracts at #4, #6, #7, #8 and #10. It's hard to believe half of the top ten changed in the last 3 hours.
EDIT: I do agree that bing's results are slightly-somewhat below google's as I do redo a search in google maybe 5% or 10% of the time, but from the point of view of someone who uses them every day they are pretty close for most things.
I'd never searched anything like this before, and I'm not using the Bing bar or anything. I didn't even try it in Google first (I did try it after, obviously)
Is this a big thing for Google+ users? Hadn't stumbled across it at all.
Did Google ever announce what the rationale for this is, from a revenue perspective? Is a link with content that a person is likely to recognize also likely to generate extra revenue?
Yes. Settings icon ( ⚙ ), then Search Settings, then Do not use personal results.
I.e., you block cookies.
At their scale, they can no doubt see patterns in data that make it worth personalising search based on those factors, regardless of wether or not you are signed in.
What makes Zynga, Twitter and Facebook "sexier"?
> Then again, a lot of what we’re hearing is from X-Googlers. Google has been competing for employees for a while by simply shelling out more cash. Perhaps newer hires are just there for the paycheck, more than the much-vaunted mission.
What percentage of Zynga hires are there for the paycheck as opposed to the "mission"?
But then, maybe Zynga's just a morally bankrupt go-for-the-bucks mercenary company so perhaps they're a perfect fit.
Of course, Lacy's take is the direction = SPYW as it was launched (as it is the news of the moment), which I more charitably interpret his words as direction = unification of Google products.
The OP is a bit light on discussion, however that doesn't mean they should do no discussion whatsoever.
TV journalism's decline in America took decades before we got to the current trash; the exact same process happened to journalist blogs over a couple years in the mid-to-late 2000s.
Ever heard of a little thing called hypocrisy? Just curious.
Larry's playing catchup with Facebook while thinking he can be Steve Jobs, and that, together with guarding the cents by removing the little things that made life @Google awesome (bagels anyone?) has led to low morale among the workforce.
Geeks with low morale don't get shit done.
They don't innovate. They don't create.
Google staff aren't code monkeys, they're not going to stick around to keep the seats warm.
The good ones will spend every hour of the day doing the bare minimum required to still get a paycheck while finding a new job.
It's money not passion that's preventing them leaving. And that's a pretty depressing atmosphere to work in.
What about working with smart people on interesting problems?
$COMPANY provides bagels. +1 "Sweet!" point. $COMPANY provides bagels, but later stops providing bagels. -10 "Sweet!" points.
The removal of a perk has a larger net negative impact on morale than its existence ever did on the positive side.
Removing the small benefits sends a message to the employees -- and it's the wrong message to send.
In my company, we've had lots of nice little luxuries in our kitchen. Slowly, they removed these, bit by bit. They save an astonishingly small amount, but morale did suffer because of that. Our extra happiness at the workplace is not worth the cents to the management -- is basically the message.
Then they came for the micro kitchens, and I didn't speak out because I didn't mind walking a little bit further.
Then they came for the free meals, and I didn't speak out because I could buy my own meals.
Then they came for the Google time, and I didn't speak out because I worked on personal projects on the weekends.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
The perks have been getting BETTER in the last few years.
Waiting for options/grants to vest, you mean?
If so, I am confused as to where this sentiment is coming from. We still get our three free meals a day, 30" monitors, standing desks, microkitchens no more than 100 feet away, and many other perks. I'm certainly encouraged to work hard, not only because the compensation is good, but because writing software at Google is so fun.
I think the media is getting the wrong impression of what internal problems Google has. Most don't say anything publicly because the internal discussion fora are much nicer than ones on the "real Internet", and because it's hard to speak publicly about Google without speaking for Google and accidentally revealing something confidential. Anyone saying "Larry Page said XXX in an internal meeting" is leaking confidential information, and as a result, all that information is going to be used for is sensational source-less tabloid articles.
Yes, people leave Google, but it's probably not due to cutbacks in perks or Search Plus Your World. It's probably, "I want to do something new!"
This is much less cool/interesting.
Apple found it necessary to own more and more pieces of the stack to innovate. Google is finding itself in the same position. Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems. Macs, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, etc.
It certainly would be nice if there was a real competitor to Google like Android competes with iOS.
This makes me really sad. It might be necessary, but you also miss out on a lot of innovation that happens when people can build off the work of others.
To steal your examples, would there be a market for the Mac or OS X if IBM had not licensed PC clones? Would there be Facebook/Twitter/GMail if the Internet had not been public-domain?
Proprietary technology may even give back more to open technology than it takes.
These are all walled gardens, they just happen to be built on open technologies.
I've seen this play out in small and large companies alike ... once the business model gets solidified and turns into a cash cow all the execs go into defense mode which manifest itself in a number of ways but my way or the highway is usually a big one.
It's good to have decent among a company so long as it is promoted in a healthy manner, having employees grumble about it at the water cooler only serves to infect the ranks but promoting an open forum where any person can decent and others can rebut allows people to at least understand why the decision where made. In some manner the conflict may be resolved for all parties through a unforeseen solution and by having a forum you promote solutioning. If I worked at Google I would be looking for the door, not because of the issue at hand but because when someone else is told to GTFO, I take it as a signal that it's probably time for me to go to because the open forum has died. It's sad really they where the Bell Labs of this time, a dream and people need dreams.
I think SPYW is dumb, but google is trying something to improve search results, it happens to use data that they have on the user. I don't think they need permission from everyone in the valley with a sign-in service they can't crawl before they're allowed to make changes that are meant to improve search. So all the bitching about it really smells like the big guys trying to SEO through telling google that they can't change their algorithm in a way that they lose rank.
-Larry Page, 2004
I think it is important to note that google is straying from their original mission, intentionally or not.
What I implied is that companies are no different to humans in some respects - your life's mission when you are 5 is different from your life's mission when you are 15, and is different from your life's mission when you are 35. And there's nothing wrong about that - companies, like people, have the age. Welcome to the new grown up Google, I suppose.
(of course, all of the above rant assumes that the quote is real. Which I decided to hunt down, and it is, apparently: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2004/08/google-playboys.html)
But the other part of the quote got me thinking - "...analogous to taking money for search results. "
I caught myself a few times this year that I'd prefer to pay for the premium quality content rather than have to wade through the soup of the ads mixed with semi-relevant results. So maybe therein lies some version of the future.
EDIT: of course, the rule "don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to ignorance" still holds and it might be just an experiment that went a bit too far - I can not reproduce the "ads above the search results" on my browser right now.
Of course, this is troubling in an entirely different manner. But at least Larry isn't a hypocrite.
That's a crucial distinction.
My suspicion is that Google is going to treat us to a very painful object lesson: what happens to your business when you compromise the values of a beloved core product.
Here's the thing: having the most complete, most accurate, most relevant search results means never having to say you're sorry. You can add ads, you can do additional products, you can add a kind of clunky single-signon, whatever. Because at the end of the day, the user needs the thing you have that no one else does.
Now, Google had this. But one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half.
Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk, with plenty of equivalent nonsense in other verticals (hello, ebooks!).
So, already, Google took its eye off the ball for the one thing that previously had been inviolable. And now there's the comically titled SPYW.
Google's not stupid: they get that the rise of mobile and specialty apps/services that go with it are going to whittle away at the searches they'll be asked to do.
They've bet the company on Android and Google+ giving them an out. Android was a good call, as it puts them in the driver's seat for a lot of this mobile action. But they need the web, too. Can they get away with compromising their search with this nouveau portal strategy?
My hunch is that they're going to pay dearly in the process of finding out the answer is no. They're too big and too smart not to make the transition to whatever the next big thing is after search.
But boy – screwing with the golden goose that earns both reputation and cash?
Well, give 'em this: they're willing to take risks.
I'm a bit confused by the recent outcry about relevance. Do people disagree that social signals can add to relevance? If not, then how does Google get these social signals, if they're locked out of FB and twitter?
It seems like a pretty clear strategy to me of simultaneously trying to grab as much social signal as possible by creating a meaningfully competitive social product, while also demonstrating to its competitors the value of allowing Google access to social signals.
I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
You can wave your hands around in pretty patterns all you want – the fact remains I'm a user who used to enjoy the product and now is frustrated by it. I'm not alone in this. Have they annoyed enough users for it to be a big problem? We'll see. But big or not – it's a problem. Adoption curves are led by early adopters. Do they really want to send the sort of person who was once a Google advocate into the arms of a competing service?
> I find it strange that everyone seems to want Google to just keep doing what it's been doing, to, in a word, stagnate. I, for one, am happy to see Google continue to do big things, undertake big initiatives, respond to a changing world.
I don't think we actually disagree here. If Google does nothing, it's dead.
I'm just not sure that the something they've chosen to do is going to be a good idea. If they lose the plot on search, there's not much to fall back on. But, sometimes you do have to bet the farm.
I'm not sure what you mean by "wave your hands around in pretty patterns." I'm not denying that these things annoy some or even many users. I'm saying Google's pretty obviously in the best position to be able to tell, and famously and religiously acts from that position to a fault.
We seem to agree that Google can't do nothing. I guess my perspective on it is that Google's willingness to change even its core source of revenue continues to draw admiration from me.
The quality of their product degraded and they just kinda... did nothing about it for awhile. It got so bad it had to turn into a press thing before they did something about it. The press is damn lazy, so for my money, that means something.
As to the rest – I share you admiration for that kind of gumption. Money can so easily blind and poison progress. So the strategy to continue evolving is sound! The tactics, though, are dubious.
I'd say that any changes to search need to be made with relevance, convenience and user satisfaction as inviolable factors. Anything else is playing with fire in a library, if you're Google.
Or maybe not. We'll see.
I just really want my 2007-era Google search back.
I do agree that the tactics are often dubious. I certainly don't always agree with them. But I can simultaneously understand the motivations behind them. I would have loved to see more grand, open initiatives like Wave, even as it failed spectacularly, but I can understand the trepidation.
You said it. I'm reminded of a line from Stephenson's Snow Crash:
Hiro runs down the center of the Towne Hall... He turns off all the techno-shit in his goggles. All it does is confuse him; he stands there reading statistics about his own death even as it's happening to him. Very post-modern.
Google's big mistakes will be the best documented mistakes in human history, especially in retrospect when historians have sufficient time to sort the data from the chaff. But that doesn't mean the mistakes won't happen.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-verbatim.htm...
The issue, for me, continues to be the quality of the results. I still have a lot of issues with duplicate content polluting the results (particularly on programming related queries). I still have to dive a few pages deep way too often to find what I really want.
Although I've yet to find a competitor who consistently does better (or even as well).
In essence, if they can't get those social signals via fb or twitter, they simply shouldn't use them. Trying to build your own social network that is getting questionable traction (at least among the majority of the people I know), then using that network to judge search results, means that your search results suffer. Your social network has to be the one people are using before the social signals are actually useful and can be said to truly help with relevance.
That is the fundamental problem here, and unless the promotion of Google+ content results in better (not higher, because they've got plenty of accounts, but better) traction for that social network, then they're shooting result quality in the foot, if not directly in the head.
Bootstrapping the social product by funneling your actually successful product's users into it seems like a fairly obvious and reasonable approach to me. (I'd rather not get into an antitrust argument here, since that's been done to death, and I find it pretty uninteresting to begin with.)
But, is there really such a market? I remember reading a blog post from a FB employee (don't have the link at hand) saying that Google over-dramatized FB's willingness to go into search, be it "social search" or whatever. What brings people to FB, and more to the point, what makes them spending hours (literally) each day on that site is not their search feature (which I'd say is not that good) but the fact that everyone and everything has a profile or a page or something (yes, maybe even the stray-dog from around my building's corner that a lot of my neighbors feed regularly - try creating a page for him on Google+).
Let's say fb/twitter release a public api to access the social signals. So things like number of likes on a particular news page. In return, is google willing to release the data on number of clicks on a particular search result for all queries? Seems a bit hyprocritical no ?
And Google's proposition to all web sites everywhere is that in exchange for indexing their content, they provide exposure through the best search engine and the main interface to the web for most people. This is also what FB and Twitter are complaining about: that they aren't receiving proper exposure.
It seems like a fair deal to me, and for Twitter and FB to be complaining about lack of exposure when they're trying to charge for the data that would appropriately affect their ranking is what seems absurdly hypocritical to me.
I honestly don't really see the downside to them opening their data to Google, though. They were in a better position before Google started G+. Google didn't want to make a social network. They just wanted the data. They had the open social initiative and were trying to make social networks interoperable, but FB and Twitter resisted. They sort of forced Google into the position of competing directly with them. Now they're complaining about it.
What really confuses me is what was the downside to them opening up to Google? (Esp. Twitter, who actually had a deal where they were getting paid for access to the firehose.) Google wasn't competing with them directly. In fact, Google was in a position to direct a lot of traffic to them.
The only thing I can imagine is that both FB and Twitter thought they were going to be able to obviate search and tried aggressively for that. I don't know why they thought Google would sit still for that, though.
I don't understand how so many people are missing the point demonstrated by http://www.focusontheuser.org/. It uses information available from Google search to inject twitter, facebook, etc results into the "your world (as long as it's google+)" module. The ranking it uses is Google's ranking of the relevant results. No special API access. No back-end deals. No money. It's stuff that's available to Google and that Google already has and has already ranked.
If they choose to dilute the worth of their search engine by injecting less-than-relevant (according to their own relevance algorithm) results in order to attempt to grow Plus (presumably hoping that'll ultimately increase the revenue to offset the losses on the search engine side of the business), they are perfectly within their rights to do so. Just don't buy their "oh we'd be happy to show more stuff but boo-hoo we don't have the data" line -- they totally have the data, and it doesn't require sweetheart deals. The only thing they can't do is grab your personal social graph and re-rank according to it. So they use something they know is sub-par (Plus's currently very partial graph) and don't bother dialing in relevance signals against their own best-in-the-world search engine.
Not related to you, but I did some experimentation on my own and published it at: halfaclick.blogspot.com/2012/01/focus-on-thy-users.html. It is not that FB (contributors from where helped develop the FOTU) shows any more focus than Google.
Also the way Focus On The User portrayed the entire thing was not that they are giving a tool that makes Google better but that Google was not using their information. And why just Facebook, Twitter and MySpace? Why not HN, Quora, SO and others?
I have no idea whether they're right.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-t...
Or turning off Search Plus Your World?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hf5K14O6Fwc/Twufv9LK1PI/AAAAAAAAAL...
No, seriously... Knowing that these two things exist, are you still unable to search what you want to?
For example, if I could I'd set synonym replacement on but turn off assuming I misspelled what I typed. Where's the option for that?
Where, you typed a word, that looks convincingly like another word had been misspelled, but in fact is correctly spelled - but has synonyms that you want to look for?
...but, sometimes you want to type something that looks like it should be autocorrected, but you want it to not autocorrect it...
...and it's not enough that you can do these things - you want them to happen automatically?
I'm sorry, but that is not "a search tool that does what you ask for," that's MAGIC that you want.
If you think a search engine exists that does this better, please tell us all about it, because I think it would be an example of an intelligent machine, in the Turing Test sense.
I hope their search quality improves. I understand it's an arms race with spammers, and they do give a lot of value for free minus ads. I guess I'm so attuned to identifying bad results by now that I haven't noticed much variability in results quality. But echo-chamber curation doesn't feel right, and the feel is important.
I miss literal search, and then they removed +keyword - but fortunately, quotes do it now. For example, rip and "rip" give slightly different results, with different emphasis within them: https://www.google.com/search?q=rip https://www.google.com/search?q=%22rip%22
Google's predictive search while you type is amazing, especially because it is so fast - you can select the search you want. It's tab-completion for the web. And it can be informative in itself, if you aren't sure of the right terms. (i.e. the deep search problem of not knowing what you are looking for).
I think they are doing a great job of searching for what you want - which is their goal. Technically precise searches aren't their main goal (though I wish they retained it somewhere).
However... artificially ranking their own links, ranking that isn't objective, is deadly to the utility of their search, and to their brand. In the past, google products have seemed to rank highly, but google claimed this was their natural rank. What is the evidence against them now? EDIT ok, the evidence is explicit and damning: http://www.focusontheuser.org/examples.php EDIT2 ok, I'm not getting the results they claim, at all. I'm using "google.com" but from Australia. Maybe that's why.
I think the notion of objectivity in search is a fallacy, and I would hesitate to characterize the addition of social search as artificial inflation, at least not any more artificial than any other part of the algorithm. The fact is: Google has more information about how to rank G+ profiles than any other profiles. That extra information adds google juice. Yes, other social networking profiles are indexed and ranked, but Google doesn't have the appropriate extra information on them that it does wrt G+.
This doesn't seem particularly hard to understand, and I'm not sure how the focusontheuser.org bookmarklet illuminates the issue. I agree that the G+ profiles are probably given too much weight, and that's probably for two reasons: 1. It's brand new and requires more data for calibration; 2. It props up G+ as a product.
From Google's perspective, even if search quality is negatively impacted in the short term while they calibrate and funnel users into G+, as long as in the long term search quality is bolstered by the additional subsequent data, it's a win.
Artificially inflating that, for the purpose of pushing their product, is the problem (that's how I'd define "artificial ranking" - ranking on a basis other than returning a page of search results for the user). This avoids the problematic term "objective".
I don't buy the "means to an end" argument. If google really is doing that, it means worse search results, loss of user confidence, and antitrust litigation (abuse of market power).
BTW: the first search example "people and places" seems to require a google+ account (as it wouldn't give me results unless I signed up). I'm happy for a google+ search to yield google+ results.
It's like saying Facebook is also "abusing its market power" because it only shows you contacts on Facebook and not on Google+. Sorry, but this cannot work this way, when you are on one network, you agree with the principles of that network, or you use another. There's no lack of options out there.
Your point about alternative search engines, and Windows being hard to avoid, is relevant for another kind of antitrust.
Aside: though, I think google is still far and away the best, in terms of response time (especially for predicting search queries as you type - that requires huge local data centres all over the world). e.g. Duck duck go has great features, but it's just too slow (at least, over here in Australia). Who can afford data-centres everywhere? (maybe Amazon...) Google also has one of the strongest brands in the world. So, the choice is kind of figurative. It's an earned monopoly, not earned through abuse, not bad or wrong; but a monopoly nonetheless.
I think the term "abuse of market power" has very thin legal ground. Anything that becomes popular tend to appear like it "abuses" its power. That's usually what competitors say when they simply give up competiting: they use lawyers and politicians to weaken the leader.
What matters in the end is what value the service provides, and if there is choice available for users to turn to other alternatives. If Google does not provide value anymore (irrelevant results) it will consumers/users in the end, and that will spark demand for better alternatives. The market will adjust. I do not really see an issue with the current situation.
Regarding search engines, Bing and Yahoo may not be as relevant but they also do the job most of the time. There will be new competitors coming, web contents are changing, the way people use the web are changing, all this environment creates opportunities to challenge search on the way. Looking through pages of results of links is hardly something that can be optimal over the long term - we will need better tools, I have no doubt about that.
Yes, change may bring new competitors that could upset google - disruption seems the destiny of most tech companies, it's just a matter of time. Interestingly, what we're seeing right now is a valiant effort on Google's part to shift from pagerank to "social-rank", in response to facebook, a new competitor. Going by history (as in "The Innovator's Dilemma", google as the incumbent will succeed if the technological innovation serves their business model - which it does.
If you're not seeing the Google+ results on some pages, it's just because Google is still in the process of rolling out the feature.
For example, I'm sure Google "knows" that I am a monolingual English speaker, but I can read enough German, French, and Spanish to struggle through a blog post telling me how to diagnose or work around a problem with my computer when that's my only choice. (Especially now that Chrome will run the whole thing through Google Translate for me.) I set an option in Google to show me pages in other languages, but these days I don't see non-English results anymore unless there are only a few pages of search results. It seems like non-English pages are penalized heavily, regardless of how high they rank as search results. (Or did everyone who used to post about technical topics in German switch to English over the last five years?)
Even if that's not true, the fact that I even think about it is a bother. I wish Google would be more simple-minded so I could have more confidence in how I understand the results.
Try setting German at "For Google text" (first on language preference page). I did, and got several german hits. Whereas, merely adding "german" for the search results (second on language preferences page) didn't add any. It's a hassle, but a solution is to change your "For Google text" setting. for each language you want.
It seems to me that the vastly greater number of english results would simply out-weigh the german resuls. The german results will still be there, but ranked much lower.
What's curious to me is that you say Google didn't formerly do this. Maybe they changed the weighting of the various languages from being equal to being weighted according to the results.
Probably searching with german terms will get german results, but again a hassle because you have to do it for each language.
EDIT following guelo's comment on "verbatim" under "All Results -> More Search Tools" on the left hand side, there's also a "Translated foreign pages" option. This gave me several results in other languages. Sounds like what you want.
BONUS: I noticed a "Search English and German pages" just under "Search the web" on the left hand side (I added German as a search language above). I think this is precisely what you wanted.
Google is impressing me.
Really? All that to get what I used to get for free? Not to mention that German is just one language, and "translated foreign pages" sounds like it might search the translated text, which is nice, unless it doesn't deliver results in untranslated pages, which leaves me wondering whether Google translates all pages or just some, and whether it's sufficiently integrated with Google Translate to filter out words that can't be translated, which are often exactly the words I want. That puts me right back where I started, sitting in front of Google wondering how the hell it works and what it's filtering out of the internet as a result.
Google aims at working without thought. But it can only do so for one target audience, and unfortunately for technically minded folk, that target has to be mainstream users. Fortunately, technical folk are usually curious to explore and customize technology.
EDIT just confirmed that it does use added search languages, as expected. e.g. if I add german and french, it provides: "Search English and French and German pages" Note: I'm not doing this for you; but because I'm curious.
Honestly, you shouldn't be so sensitive that you perceive criticism of a web app as criticism of your advice, or assume that I didn't check up on it. I just wasn't happy about what I found. Per my first post, all I want is to be able to use Google and understand roughly what it's doing, and it failed very badly in this case, since the one thing I was counting on it to do -- include foreign language pages, because I asked it to -- was actually the thing it wasn't doing.
You can add more than one language. If you'd checked up on it, you would have seen that. I perceive this as complaining about advice without following it, and I find it annoying.
If you're still angry (and it sounds legitimate, especially if there was a subtle hint of a problem, but not enough to register fully), that explains where you're coming from, which puzzled me.
Aside: Unfortunately with webpages/webapps, they can and do get updated continuously, without explicit version changes or any notification at all. Ideally, all changes would be back-compatible, but then you end up with a mess (both in user interface and implementation). Continuous notifications amounts to spam, and is usually ignored (I do). Change is a problem. I'm not sure there's a solution.
I think back-compatibility is a deep, abiding, practical problem, in general.
EDIT "if the choices I made have been superseded and contradicted": just realized this is more than merely "backcompatibility of UI". In effect, they have destroyed your data. Although that sounds overdramatic, since the data itself is very minor (perhaps one bit, a binary checkbox), it's a clear trigger for notification. There might be some grey area for when your configuration is still there, but has a different meaning - but I think you're saying that your config is no longer there, and/or no longer has an effect.
I used to use Yahoo finance, and they had a nice display of 9 user-configured stocks at the top. In their latest redesign, this disappeared, and I couldn't find an option to bring it back. This was enough to make me spurn their product, and switch to google finance. It makes me think they have no idea what they are doing. I guess in this case, I had notification (as I could see it was gone). But if they had an explicit reference to it going away, even if it said "sorry, this is going away", I would feel better about it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe it is still available somewhere, and I just couldn't find it.
So, changing the meaning of a user-specified configuration should probably trigger an explicit notification (and force the implementer to consider it); and deleting user-specified configuration should never happen, even if it has no effect. I think it should be treated as sacrosanct as other data stored (e.g. gmail emails, dropbox files etc). If changes render it ineffective, it should still be there, but with a notice: "this no longer works, use this instead". Again, this forces the implementer to thin about what they are doing.
Re the "just one language" thing, I can imagine I'm not making sense, because I'm not really communicating the context of how irrationally enraged I am over this. The truth is that I only enabled a couple of languages because I was just too angry and frustrated to enable the rest. I know it doesn't make any rational sense, but my reptile brain is telling me that goddammit, Google is not going to make me click on fifty little boxes just to fix them erasing my preferences. Not today. Not this user. There is a part of the brain that is trained to recognize when someone is jerking you around or abusing you, and when it gets triggered inappropriately, it is impossible to turn off. (I'm sure anyone who has worked in customer service will recognize what I'm talking about. Right now I am the bug-eyed paranoid who is convinced they are intentionally screwing with me for their own amusement.) So long story short, yes, it seems immensely important to me that I have to check fifty boxes instead of one, and I still don't have my unfiltered search results, not until I calm down enough to go click on all those boxes.
As for the problem of change, I can sympathize with the problem they face. I'm sure that globally minimizing user confusion and frustration is one of their goals. As for me personally, they'll have to count me in the "used the product incorrectly for years without realizing it and is now very angry about it" category.
UPDATE: EVEN ANGRIER:
So I swallowed my pride and went to work clicking.
"The page at https://www.google.com says:
The number of language restrictions is limited to 8, so only 8 of the languages selected will be saved."
That doesn't bode well. But then: "The page at https://www.google.com says:
Your preferences have been saved"
Ah, but guess which time it was lying :-/
So unless there's another way to turn off language filtering, Google will filter out every language besides your primary language and seven others. (Yeah, your interface language counts as one of the eight.)
That's terrible. Even without Google Translate, I swear I got useful information from a page in Polish once. Plus there are pictures, video, miscategorized pages, mixed-language pages (what happens with those?) and the simple coolness of finding out that someone in Vietnam is using an open-source library you committed a patch to. And of course, Google freakin' Translate! Unless Google is translating every single page it crawls. Which it might be -- that's something to think about. But it does very poorly with some pairs of languages, and if it filters out every term it can't translate, then it will tend to filter out commands and symbols. And here I am speculating about how it works again, which goes back to my original point.
With my track record today, I'm sure I'll find out I'm misinterpreting this somehow, but I'm starting to feel a little bit justified in my anger. Ah, I can't lie. I feel much less angry now that I feel like less of a fool :-)
I'm with you on the inappropriately triggered jerking-me-round neuron. I am definitely there from time to time :-). You put it well. When in that state, I don't really believe that someone in the real world is messing with me - but inside my world, I believe someone is. I think that I can't quite see the real world in that state (or don't want to). Funny thing is, if I find out someone is messing with me, I also feel less angry...
Oh man, that's awful. And that "limited to 8" dialog pops up for each checkbox. Seems a really badly designed interface in general. I wonder why the limit? Maybe they keep languages separate, because effective pagerank criteria differ across languages/cultures; and they're limiting internal bandwidth needed to combine the results from distant databases.
I was going to say you could just include the languages you can read (and where you often found useful info before); but I appreciate your point about seeing the whole web (I guess, the www), across languages.
I've had a play with google translate, and I noted that untranslated words seem to pass through, unaltered (using the text-based one, eg: http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto|en|Je%20n... ) You could probably see by trying example pages til you find a word it doesn't know. It seems much more useful to include an untranslated word than to omit it, so hopefully they do it that way.
Given the 8 limit, this seems the best option for seeing the whole web - and if the translation is any good at all, it might be better. I might try this (though I recall reading something that I didn't notice was auto-translated, and after reading for a while, suddenly becoming aware that I had no idea what it meant...)
I wonder if just plain more information about a situation reduces anger, because anger relies on one's internal view of the world? The more acquainted we get with the real world, the harder it is to sustain anger. (Aside: The Buddhists say all negative emotion is based on ignorance or misconception - of seeing something as 100% absolutely negative - and so negative emotion can be reduced by deeper understanding.)
There is the 'Verbatim' search option hidden on the SERP page on the left hand side under All Results -> More Search Tools -> Verbatim
The one thing that annoys me most these days, however, is that it also searches for "bike" when I type "motorbike"; I get endless irrelevant results about cycling in many longer queries. I recall other search engines in the past implementing cluster-based analysis to disambiguate homographs (with user selection on the SERP), but Google still isn't clever enough to fully figure out how "bike" means something different on motorbike-related pages than on cycling-related pages.
You could use the form at - https://www.google.com/quality_form?q=google+search+quality&...
I doubt Amit Singhal would object to receiving a specific report about bad search results.
See, for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277867
I don't work on search quality, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you send specific examples to the search quality team, either through the feedback form, or some other means - heck send it to Matt Cutts - it will be looked at and used to improve search quality.
The more specific you can be, the better.
"Searches for bikes suck for me" isn't very useful :-)
"When I enter the query 'blah blah blah', the following urls (url1, url2, url3, ...) are completely irrelevant to me." Even better, say why you think the urls are irrelevant.
If you submit reports like this, I can promise you that the search quality team will take them seriously and will praise your name (if possibly only internally :-) )
https://www.google.com/search?q=low+tire+pressure+motorbike
Lots of stuff in there about mountain bikes, Sheldon Brown, etc.
Definition for spyw: Web definitions: (SPYWS) Stroke Prevention in Young Women Study. www.health.am/acronyms/s7/
you're welcome! (edit: to be fair though, the first link is a good one and explains the whole situation) (edit 2: oh wait! That's because of my personal search results. This is too funny)
It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year.
But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating.
Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.
Then they had to start pretending that things had more upvotes than they really did, which made it worse.
The place ghetto-ised in a scarily quick fashion.
I'm not sure though how much the earlier 'Digg-revolts' over senselessly mucking around with the UI contributed. Had they already destroyed or eroded a lot of the goodwill of their users?
Personally I believe the problem started back when they decided to boot Apple stories off the front page, and twiddled their algorithm to achieve it. Yes, Windows fanboys hated seeing those stories popping up all the time, and would go in and troll the Apple fans something chronic (and then complain that it was justified because the Apple users were doing the same thing - even though they weren't)... but doctoring the results like that just meant that what was (at that time) basically one of the few IT companies doing new and interesting things, instead of just being a "me too" copycat.
I'm pretty sure that most people like this. I hated this feature at first; I would search for "obscure error message" and Google would say 'Did you mean "non-obscure error message"?'. It's annoying because that's not what I meant, but I realized that there were simply no pages on the Internet that answered my question about "obscure error message". So Google assumed I made a tiny spelling mistake, and tried to give me relevant results.
For everyone who's not searching for programming error messages, I think this works really well. I've watched my family and friends use Google and they can't spell or even come up with good search terms to save their life. Despite that, Google always gives them relevant results, because 99.99% of the time, it knows what they want.
Remember, Google doesn't change their product to make it worse. Every move is designed to improve relevancy (or revenue, perhaps), and features that don't work get reverted. (Remember Code Search or Google Video? They didn't work out, and they're gone now.)
Social is the 2012 version of "let's try to make search better". We'll have to wait a while to see if it does. Going with our gut will tell us to refuse change and keep everything the same forever. But data will tell us what users really think, and Google+ hasn't been around long enough to collect the data.
Meanwhile, SERP quality began to deteriorate as well. We suffered for something like 18 months under the regime of those Stack Overflow scrapers and their ilk... and now there's the comically titled SPYW.
Don't you think having your friends affect search results is a good solution to this problem? Google couldn't figure out which site with SO content was legitimate. Now it sees all your friends linking to StackOverflow.com, and it knows that it should probably trust that content more.
I think geeks dislike social networking (I do), and so they assume Google+ is going to fail. But I think that having my friends carve out a little part of the Internet that's most relevant to me is going to be helpful in the long run. More helpful than "Your Friend has given you 86 potato seeds" that you get from social networking on Facebook, anyway.
Matt Cutts wrote a good article about this, BTW: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-plus-your-world/
EDIT: Never mind. Didn't know you are a Googler. of course you agree with Matt Cutts. :)
The HBS case study on Google won't even mention "don't be evil" except maybe as an example of how amateurs shouldn't be permitted to do corporate communications.
There are plenty of companies that we love (hello, Apple) that don't pretend to have lofty corporate values. Yet we keep buying their products and they keep making assloads of money. That's the way it is.
Speak for yourself... there are plenty of us who cheerily invite Apple to go straight to hell. You can certainly count me among their number, for one.
I have no use whatsoever for their anti-hacker ethos, their locked-down, proprietary, "no user repairable parts inside" attitude, and the arrogance with which they presume to know more about what the customer needs, than the customer does.
I'm sure this is going to be unpopular, but sorry, when it comes to corporate success, values don't mean shit.
That's hardly a settled point. There's evidence on both sides of the argument, to this day.
Honestly, from my point of view, just myself counts as "plenty" in this context. But I'm pretty sure the number is actually higher than that. Just count up all the F/OSS ideologues who refuse to use closed-source / proprietary software as a matter of principle, for starters. And I'm guessing there are a handful of folks who don't count themselves as total GNU hippies, but still prefer to shy away from companies that sell products based around such a locked-down, proprietary, closed-off ethos.
Apple was crowned as the biggest PC maker in the world this week.
I never said they weren't successful... I'm just saying that not everybody buys into their bullshit or likes their shitty proprietary products, that's all.
...So you've chosen to swallow someone else's bullshit line then instead? That's way better.
We may not all value the same things, that doesn't mean we need to be deliberately ignorant about the appeal others see in a product.
...Huh?
You appear to be replying to me, but I'm puzzled by what you've typed. Who mentioned anything about values? This is about ruining a core product's user experience and the repercussions of any strategy that allows that.
This is my perception of how Google evolved:
In the early days, it used to be like running grep on the whole internet but getting your results sorted by a very relevant algorithm (page rank). Then over the years they added a lot of features that fell into three categories:
* operators to run more powerful queries
* adding more complexity to the sorting of the results (localization, penalizing websites trying to game the algorithm, ...)
* adding widgets given the query (ups tracking, weather, calculator, ...)
These were all good, and I loved the fact that you could run some very clever and complex queries to get exactly what you wanted (and the googledorks were born...).
But recent improvements to Google have all been about "guessing what the user wants" (the best illustration of that is the search as you type) and while it's hard to argue about the validity of this approach my problem with it is that it won't give me any fallback options when it guesses wrong.
To be honest, Google does a very good job at guessing what I want. But the frustration caused by the few times it doesn't get it just makes me miss the "old google". And with every new recent improvement I keep being reminded of the MentalPlex [1]
[1] http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/mentalplex/
I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches, very local results for everyday related searches. And these expectations might change depending on any random factor.
I don't think google can weasel out what I want in what context. And I don't feel like adjusting dozens of options everytime I do a different kind of search.
Before google started making search smarter, the burden was on my shoulder to do the work to get relevant results for my queries. Now that the algorithms do more and more assumptions, I get to fight with it more and more, and before the blame lies on my search skills, it goes to google for making it hard.
My solution was to use separate engines (including multiple instance of the same ones, like ncr, US only, jp only etc), but a fast a dumb engine is really the way to go.
I hope that duckduckgo will get that it doesn't need to compete with Google at the "guessing what the user wants" and keep providing clear and concise ways to make very specific queries.
To be clear: "This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" != “Fuck off”.
There is plenty that could be said about the sad state of tech blogging but some of the blame falls on Google because they are losing the PR battle. It’s obvious that PR staff from Twitter/Facebook and others are doing a much better job at selling their rhetoric to these tech blogs, specially to the newly formed blogs looking for audience and traffic.
OP: I'd be really interested to hear your take on why tech blogging is so pro-Apple/Twitter/FB and anti-Google. I have no connection to Google but it seems to me that Google is by far doing the most good in the world compared to the other 3 (Although Twitter has also done good things during e.g. the Arab Spring).
Facebook, on the other hand, is very easy to ignore. I killed my account there several years ago and haven't really thought about Facebook since, since Facebook is nothing but a social network and I'm not really a big social networking guy.
I think that's what's going on here.
(I would say, "people are worried that there will only be one provider for XXX", where XXX is mail or search or chat or whatever, but I know that's not true. People did not mind AOL or Windows or the three big banks, so I doubt they really care that Google is "the only game". Slashdot users hate monopolies, but I'm not sure the average consumer cares.)
I like Google+ and SPYW, so I can only speculate. But, since I work for Google, it's important to me to be able to understand what complaints users have about our products.
People frequently dislike change, and so I'm pleased that a major company such as Google has the will to change and improve it's services. But they not only improve their services, which is good for their bottom line, but also releases a lot of their work and research which helps others.
Also, as you pointed out, I dislike social and dislike that products like that continue to intrude into my search results.
[1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-every-marketer-now-needs-a-go...
[2] another rand video I can't find right now
Also, I don't get the big push on "SEO". Just buy an ad and now you're above all the organic results anyway.
My main point was without something like +1 they are in a never ending arms race, they needed to disrupt that cycle of tweeks and return to status-quo.
...sounds like spyware... ...looks like spyware...
It isn't. Get over it.
The issue with Facebook's changes to privacy was not that they are opt-out, but that they were opt-out and significantly impacted user privacy. Opt-out services on their own may be annoying, but they aren't a cause for alarm unless it hurts the user.
Facebook at least pretends to care about privacy and then screws the user, whereas Google just skips to step B