All evidence indicates that JC Penny was ranked #1 until the NYT provided Google with the evidence that it had collected.
Google then acted on the evidence. As a result of those actions, JC Penny's rank dropped from #1 to #71.
It is funny that he should say "Google's algorithms had started to work". Presumably, the algorithm doesn't depend on a New York Times reporter telling Google that they were being gamed :)
No, you are wrong about the timeline and what happened when. It is explained pretty clearly in the NYT article: "True, JCPenney.com’s showing in Google searches had declined slightly by Feb. 8, as the algorithm change began to take effect. In "comforter sets," Penney went from No. 1 to No. 7. In "sweater dresses," from No. 1 to No. 10." That happened the day before Google took manual action. BTW, going from #1 to #7 and #10 is not just a "slight decline."
At this point there's so much noise in Google Results that they're becoming an option of last resort. Not only is there a lot of noise, there's no real usable information from others on the quality of the results.
If I'm looking for a local vendor I go to Yelp, if I'm buying something I go to Amazon, and if I'm looking for coding help I go to Stack Overflow. I don't know that we necessarily need one site to replace Google; it seems to me that the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over.
I know what you mean about searching for local vendors or buying something; my experience is that a Google search isn't great for either of those. I still find Google pretty useful for coding help, though, and personally I don't tend to go straight to somewhere like Stack Overflow.
Could you give an example or two where Stack Overflow gets you an answer more quickly than a Google search?
Here's my example: In gdb, I want to list all of the threads in my running program. A Google search for "gdb list threads" gives me the answer in the first result. The same search on Stack Overflow doesn't seem to give me the answer in the first few results. This is hardly scientific, of course, so I'm interested to hear of coding questions where Stack Overflow does a better job than a Google search.
Mea culpa. SO was definitely my weak example there... if they had a better on-site search it wouldn't be an issue but I guess they mostly just optimize for Google search. So a lot of the time I end up Googling tech issues, but then clicking on the SO link because I know there will be multiple answers on that page instead of just one.
No worries, I also notice that SO comes up in Google results quite a lot and that's generally how I access it as well so I also do a Google search for tech issues and then end up clicking on the SO link.
Your post yesterday got me thinking about why Google is still pretty useful for coding questions but not so for searches of a more commercial nature. I guess it isn't worth so much money to game Google for the former (Experts Exchange notwithstanding).
"the era of free text search being the dominant paradigm may just be over"
Perhaps it is the era of a global single instance search engine that is starting to come to an end - maybe we need a sensible way of having topic specific search engines and/or trusted content sites and allowing an easy way of treating these as if they were a global search engine.
Pretty much the same interface but a better implementation.
And yes, I know "meta" search engines have been around for a long time but, as far as I recall, don't try and identify the best places to perform your search - they just search run your search through a pile of generic search engines and aggregate the results.
This happened ~10 years ago when search-engine results were too messy for the throngs that were looking for the Dancing Baby, so the business world invented portals. Then portals became useless because their curatorial layers were not scalable, but by then search engines had made improvements and the pendulum swung the other way.
It's a natural see-saw between specialization and generalizations (there's probably a one-word term for this in evolutionary biology). We see the same in thin-client/thick-client talk in client-server/webapp contexts.
It's funny that someone who just sold out to AOL would choose to trash Demand Media.
> If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn’t exist.
Would Associated Content? Would AOL?
- - -
This is a cheap article that plays with words; it's titled "search still sucks", which is debatable but "truish", but what it really tries to say is that search "sucks more and more", which is provably false.
And it's 100% evidence free, too, as is the rule in the new entertaining noisosphere of blogism.
> So what is the evidence that search still sucks? Well, you know it’s true, just like me.
Mr. Arrington sounds like a priest now; what's the evidence that God exists? Well, you know it's true, don't you?
I was wondering why there were so few negative comments here on Michael Arrington posts.I have just read his biography on wikipedia.
Now I feel very naive. It Must be obvious I am new here. I understand no one here want to piss off this guy (like in my other comment). At least no one trying to launch a startup.
Search engines would benefit enormously from using data from social bookmarking sites. If you haven't lately used Delicious to search, I highly recommend it. The breadth of search isn't as far-reaching, but all of the results have essentially been pre-filtered by however many users have bookmarked it -- it's unlikely that many people would bookmark a spammy site or site with crap content.
I think Google results could vastly be improved if they tied together their normal rankings with a "how many people have bookmarked this URL (and to some extent, URLs from this domain)" metric. I've worked closely with Delicious' set of data, and it's nothing short of incredible. Billions of instances of people categorizing sites and vouching for their quality are going unused in the search space.
If black hat seos started to believe Google was paying specific attention to Delicious bookmarks, Delicious would be flooded with fake accounts faster than you can say "link farm".
History of search:
1. New company releases new search engine, better than the competition because it pays attention to a previously ignored signal.
2. Seos work out how to game the signal.
3. New search engine is now as crappy as the search engines it replaced.
Really, internet search is like macroeconomics: soon after you understand {how to prevent recessions, how to find the best webpages}, the problem vanishes and is replaced by something even more complex and incomprehensible. Furthermore, this has already happened.
This has interesting implications, I think, in the business of search.
It's almost like a negative network effect. The more people that use a search engine, the more people try to game it, and the less useful it becomes for finding what you want. This seems like it'd make things much easier for new competitors like duck-duck-go to bring a superior product... at least until they gained enough market share to be worth SEO time gaming.
You're quite right. But pretty much every strategy a search engine uses is susceptible to black hat SEO. I think there's something to be said about having the system use how others are reacting to your comments rather than just what your content is and who links to it. Yes, you could farm out Delicious accounts and have them bookmark your site, but from a SE perspective it's easier to remedy this problem (Delicious requiring captchas periodically, looking for accounts which have an uncanny amount of similar bookmarks in a span of time, etc) than it is to come up with strange rules about content that the black hat is free to change.
Judging by the votes, apparently it is more valuable to point out why a certain idea might not work, even if all of the alternatives have the same problem, than it is to suggest something with exciting possibilities. Nothing against you, personally -- your comment is quite right and I agree gaming is a major concern.
Really cool study, thanks for sharing. I don't think the research proves that social media wouldn't be a worthwhile signal. They really don't look into how bookmarking data could be applied to results, they just look at how bookmarked sites relate to search results and the web at large. The strongest conclusion is that Delicious users only bookmark a sliver of the web's content, and while the researchers considers this a weakness. I would consider it a strength.
The way I see it, search engines are entirely inclusive, while bookmarking sites are selectively inclusive. For certain ultra-specific queries, I'd much prefer the search engine approach -- I want as much breadth as possible. For other not-so-specific queries, I'd much prefer the result sites to be vouched for by people. Looking one step further, probably for a decent chunked size of my search queries, I'm OK if the number of sites it is searching over is only about 10,000,000 (my estimate for how many sites on Delicious have been bookmarked by more than 20 users).
What I find exciting is that the two can be effectively combined. Take all the normal results that a search engine would show, but give it a boost based on the log of how many times it's been bookmarked. It really is that simple.
The problem is that normal humans don't USE social bookmarking sites. Nor do they tweet/share much of value on facebook. Google is VERY good at serving up great results for things that you could imagine the "linkerati" might link to. Start drifting into travel, home remodeling, etc., and it gets pretty grim.
This is a type of sentience analysis. Google could also give better weights for links that are associated with things like "I love Ebay", rather than "[example.com] is a fraud!", but they don't yet (AFAIK).
Travel searches, for example, are a joke, and startups like Gogobot are popping up to try to fix that.
This is how Google is finally toppled. Not by a "google killer" or another giant like Bing, but by a thousand tiny niche services that get "X" search right.
This is true, but it has always been true. Google has always sucked for product review searches, local service vendors (try finding a plumber anyone?), travel searches etc. The odd thing is why people continue to use it for all these things. Perhaps the ads?
'Search still sucks' seems like quite an exaggeration when the average user (whoever that is) isn't even noticing any 'decline'.
I usually always find what I am looking for when using Google and haven't noticed any major changes recently when it comes to the search results. Maybe because I am taking some of my searches straight to respective sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, Discogs but still.
Also, ever since day one a bit of 'common sense' helps determining which results are actually useful (and I am all right with that).
Apparently, this blog author has been ousted as "bribed by Microsoft for secret advertising disguised in posts"
There has been a lot "google search sucks" submission from Techcrunch lately. This was starting to feel a little weird. So I googled "Michael Arrington Microsoft" and got this :
There's a lot of "google search sucks" lately because google search sucks. I would also be wary of techrights.org when it comes to regarding anything Microsoft.
Arrington was paid to appear in a Microsoft ad. Journalists usually don’t endorse companies or appear in their ads, especially if the also write about said companies.
That’s ethically questionable behavior but certainly not bribery. It has also no relation to the submitted article.
(I like how the author of the article you are linking to describes an interview with Ballmer as “spoke to Ballmer 4 months ago” which sounds much more suspect, especially considering the context. He certainly has a way with words.)
Heh that's Roy Schestowitz, I can remember him flooding Digg years ago. Nobody's certain if he's really a particularly hardcore anti-Microsoft troll or if he's actually paid by Microsoft because he's so ridiculously zealous it reflects poorly on everyone else.
Google loves what you guys call spam because it allows Google to generate more revenues.
When a content farm pushes first pages results this causes the real manufacturers and businesses to use Google's advertising platform to reach their customers.
When you're looking for a kitchen appliance It's better for Google to return a landing page filled with Google Adsense ads instead of the official website of one of these appliance manufactures. Again for the same reason mentioned above.
What this really means, is that Google should eliminate the middleman. Google shouldn't fight content farms. It should become the unstoppable juggernaut among content farms and do this by being actually useful and creating pages with value.
I'm afraid to say something like this, but some linkspam/scraper sites are verging on looking almost useful.
I was trying to Google references to Greek Playwright Aristophanes' use of fart jokes (yes, seriously I was looking for that) and I came across this linkspam page:
For one thing, this site doesn't offend my eyes. It doesn't immediately insult my intellect, either. After the first second, though, it still proves to be just as useless.
In a way, what Cuil was trying to do was to apply enough AI to make an actually very useful scraper site. What would the world be like if such sites actually existed?
I totally agree! Googles search results is starting to suck. If I'm sitting with an errorcode for some sort of program, trying to search it on google, will just give me a couple of random generated botsites.
I have moved permanently to Duckduckgo. :-)
I thought this was a great point: "When companies start to flail they nearly always do a couple of things. First, they trash the competitors. Then the talk about how hard the problem is and that the solution is a long term one."
This is why I think it'd be great to see Google release all the 40,000+ test queries which Google/Matt Cutts took back in 2000. It would help to put to rest some of the "Google is regressing and getting worse" debate one way or the other (and I suspect by showing that such talk is more sensationalist than accurate; I think Google search has improved a fair amount).
The article does make some interesting points, and I am a bit confused at the supposed sequence of events with the JC Penny/NY Times story. Plus it does raise the question of why a company who previously has had some SEO issues was - apparently - able to game Google's rankings in such a major way (using such spammy methods) without Google picking up on it for months.
That's a conclusion point from the article which I think is a well founded one.
As for the other points in the article's conclusion though:
>> "But all the evidence suggests otherwise. Demand Media is worth $1.6 billion, and their entire business is based on pushing cheap, useless content into Google to get a few stray links. If Google was good at search, Demand Media wouldn't exist."
"wouldn't exist" is subjective. If Demand Media weren't pumping out content, what would rank in its place? Part of Demand Media's success is that they are 'filling in the gaps' and covering content surrounding keywords which don't really warrant much competition. Sure this isn't always the case - and Demand Media's sites do sometimes rank highly for some rubbish content with other alternatives available - but in many cases it does seem to be at least part of the reason for DM's success.
Do I like some of Demand Media's content? No.
Do I like that Demand Media seem happy to have some pages with more adverts than content? No.
Do I think that Google et al should not even index some of their pages (some of which can at current rank fairly well)? Yes.
Do I think that there's many good alternatives to some of DM's content? NO. Unfortunately.
>> "And Bing wouldn't be making solid gains in search market share."
I might have different ideas about what "solid gains" means, although to me a percentage point here or there doesn't amount to much.
If - say - a Presidential candidate seen his/her opinion polls increase by 1 or 2%, you wouldn't see a bunch of stories saying how the candidate is making "solid gains".
In-fact, if a mainstream media source run an article on (say) a political party who seen a 2% rise in their opinion polls - and thus concluded that said party is making "solid gains" - I'd feel intellectually insulted and suspect the mainstream media source of bias.
So I definitely feel that this conclusion point is sensationalism (and inaccurate sensationalism, at that) and nothing more.
So all in all, a decent article which makes some decent points (at times). But it does also feel a bit of a shallow 'staying in the bandwagon' type of article, too.
If "the customer's always right", then, for the current search situation, you have to ask: Who's the customer?
--
P.S. Google: I'd accept, gratefully, as a stopgap, being able to specify multiple "site:foo" parameters. I don't know what the computational (or financial) impact to you would be.
(So far, I've held off trying browser extensions to accomplish this, but I guess I can start looking for one having a good reputation.)
I've tried that [before], but with multiple parameters, I simply got zero results. I then enclosed the site:foo OR site:bar within parentheses, leaving the rest of the query outside parentheses. Whichever site:foo came first would be matched, but only it appeared to be matched. Subsequent site:bar, etc. parameters did not produce any matches in the results.
I'll have a look at your links, in a minute -- probably should have done that first.
EDIT: Well, your second link sure works. I wonder what I was doing wrong. When I saw someone else('s or s') comments online to the effect that it didn't work, I assumed that was why my own experience failed.
I'm in serious need of some coffee, at the moment. Thanks for correcting my mis-impression; I look forward to straightening it out in my mind and taking advantage of this feature.
Just tried DuckDuckGo on "windows autorun". What a world of difference. Top two links are recent news, and the third link is the authoritative KB from MS on disabling/re-enabling.
I tried DDG some months (years?) ago, but it was too inconsistent. Maybe it's ready for prime time, or at least the Late Late Show, now. Jazz hands!
All evidence indicates that JC Penny was ranked #1 until the NYT provided Google with the evidence that it had collected. Google then acted on the evidence. As a result of those actions, JC Penny's rank dropped from #1 to #71.
It is funny that he should say "Google's algorithms had started to work". Presumably, the algorithm doesn't depend on a New York Times reporter telling Google that they were being gamed :)