Wilbur Nutsack Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 Anyone find that google ends up giving you peoples stupid personal pages, rather than a relevant search? Its old technology now and it cant handle the internet in the same way it used to. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000751.html http://www.theregister.com/content/6/33366.html http://www.theregister.com/content/35/33448.html A couple of alternatives........... http://www.teoma.com http://www.alltheweb.com Wilbur Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickle Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 yes i've noticed it going downhill. For a while I thought it was just my searching technique getting worse but there is too much chaff in google. There is way way too many planted search results by scummy american companies trying to spam google. On the positive side their calculator application is amazing for those who don't know what i mean type "5 * 25" in google or "6 feet in metres". Doesn't make up for a sometimes frustrating search experience. I have noted that google groups more and more brings up racist/middle east/american politics post results at the slightest chance. I think its got a shit load of data but isn't getting much better at understanding it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NPK Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 (edited) Google has dropped the use of its "Pagerank" ( Or I've heard is dropping ?) ranking system as too many people had learned how to abuse it to get their site higher. The system they are using now is not much better than altavista and the rest. npk Edited October 17, 2003 by NPK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NPK Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 source Emergency fixes for blog-clogged Google By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco Posted: 17/10/2003 at 09:53 GMT It's hard to say what needs patching more urgently, right now: Microsoft Windows or Google. But at least Microsoft makes its fixes conspicuously available. Google's notorious culture of secrecy forbids it from offering even the most innocent explanations. Fortunately, Register readers have come to the rescue. On Sunday Google admitted to the Washington Post that it was working on a bug it had found which was withholding thousands of legitimate search results from its users. The bug was in response to another bug: Google's susceptibility to being gamed by spammers who set up 'link farms' to tripwire its PageRank™ algorithm. "Is Google starting to show signs of strain against spammers and Web scammers?", asked the Post. And this week yet another bug seemed to illustrate that the patched-up search engine was losing the battle. Google can't weed out its search results for 'blog noise', such as the millions of empty pages created by Movable Type's "Trackback" feature, we reported. If you compare Google's search results for OS X Panther discussion with AltaVista's, AltaVista scored a clean sweep - providing a Top Ten free of the Trackback virus that Movable Type webloggers have unwittingly dumped on the Internet. Seven out of the top ten results from Google were duds: empty trackback pages. In the absence of a bug-report from Google, here are some emergency patches, from Register readers. "Perhaps the answer is to put -trackback into google whenever you search," writes Paul Fleetwood. "It certainly fixed the example you provided. Though maybe google need to make it a default setting." Stuart Bell agrees. "Perhaps Google should consider such an innocuous fix? Granted, we'll end up in yet another arms race between the blogger software folks and Google filters, but that's life out on the wild and wooly Internet frontier, eh?" Paul Tomblin offers the more sophisticated filter -mt-tb.cgi - which seems to do the trick nicely. "I suppose the simplest way to do this would be putting a new section in the Google preferences page - a noise filter, spam filter, blog filter, whatever - which has either hard-coded or user editable exclusions for searches," Andrew Hodgkinson. "To be much use for the 'average casual searcher' who doesn't know about preferences, advanced search or blogs, it probably ought to be switched on by default - a little risky (as with any spam filter it might block legitimate content), but surely no more so than SafeSearch." Indeed so. Perhaps with its executives fixated on an IPO, and aggressively expanding the company's advertising franchise, Google has forgotten that it once had a search engine too, way back when. Perhaps the executives would like to attend to it now. ® Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickle Posted October 17, 2003 Share Posted October 17, 2003 Blogs are www pollution imho. hate the buggers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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