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Google is your friend ?

M

Micom 2000

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 6, 2004
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Manitoba North of 50 degrees Latitude
Often the reply to newbys is the phrase "Google is your friend" usually a mild rebuke for not dong one's own search. However the phrase grates on my nerves when even the rebuke is justified.

Google is not your friend. It is a commercal operation whch usually only returns links to vultures who thirst after your business whether or not it actually replys to your needs.

I was an early advocate of Google, alerted to it in the classisccmp forum. It was Yahoo without the obligatory ads. This is no longer the case. Attemptng to find information is like going thru the yellow pages and just as perilous.

At one time one could use a search engine to peruse the internet such as DEC's Alta-Vista which would return scholarly papers from universities, or even the expensive Compuserve for explanations and downloads of new software.

Altho Google started as an alternative to all the commercial exploitaton of the web, it has become the alter-ego of all we hated and protested against with the first spam from the Idaho lawyers which caused such a fuss and is now normal.

While I hope for some small search engine which bypasses the corporate vultures, and advertising monoliths, which was the promise of Google, I know it is unlikely. Even should it appear, it is subject to the same perverson of values demanded by the corporate market and likely to succumb to the same financial pressures . Unfortunate, because self-seeking commercial demand has always been a drag on societal advancement to the benefit of a few.

Lawrence
 
Lawrence,

The entire commerical universe is not your enemy. Google is just a service - choose to use it, or not use it. Other services exist if you don't like the service. It's not a monopoloy that anybody has mandated.

Google is successful and can sell advertising because it's search engine is fast and the search results are usually relevant. People fled Yahoo! and AltaVista because Google was faster and gave far better results. They have their market share because they earned it, and continue to earn it.

Your railing against the commercialism on Google is misplace. Consider that in the past 10 years (when Google first appeared on the scene) that the Internet in general is a far more commercial place. That doesn't mean that Google did it - Google just reflects what is happening in the world at large.

Their Adwords and commercial advertisements are clearly marked and unobtrusive. Have you forgotten about how bad the other search engines were before Google went with the minimalist approach? Do you remember popups and banner ads? Yahoo! and AltaVista became impossible with all of the clutter they introduced in the name of the almighty dollar.

Find a better target to rail about. Somali pirates are high on my list at the moment. As are the bankers who were reckless and did not understand the fire they were playing with. Or the high level executives who keep trying to move jobs overseas because it is supposed to be cheaper, despite the devastating impact it has on our society. Google is fairly benign in all of this mayhem.
 
L,

Although, as you know, I do enjoy your anarchical and often irreverent rants, I gotta agree with Mike on this one. If you gotta rail against Corporatism, there are much better targets. Google is actually rather benign by comparison to other multi-nationals, and it is still free (you don't have to buy the products, or even read the ads), and sometimes even useful to n00bs like me.

--T
 
There is much I can agree with in both the above posts. I won't get into the politics here :) but that is what that discussion really comes down to.

I can see it a slightly different way also. I too dislike words like "google" as a verb and also "windows" as assumed to be MS. To solve that problem I try to substitue the words "search" ( or "net search") and a proper name for windows such as "MS-Windows". That way I can refer to these things without completely embracing them. Generally, it's also a better idea to use clear language.

Regarding search engines: I have recently decided that I am using Google way too much, so I decided to try Yahoo sometimes. To my surprise (don't ask why) they often give better results on some searches. So does Microsoft (shudder) live search. The bottom line is that just because I don't like a company's politics, doesn't mean that they don't have something to offer me. By being a little judicious, I can have my politics without shooting myself in the foot.

@ Micom 2000: if you really don't like Google, may I suggest that you use SCROOGLE. You can google it (haha) but here's a link.
 
I use Yahoo and Google because I know the results will be different. However, yesterday in Google and Yahoo - I typed in "Bulgaria"+"Mountain Music". The Number One Pick Google came up with gave me a Website which didn't even have Bulgaria in it!! And Yet - and you know how you can see some text belong the links the search engines give you - that had "Bulgaria" in them! :-o Using the same Search criteria in Yahoo - the same site (which Google had as it's #1 Pick) was somewhere in the Top 5! So really what could be deemed a suitable Search Engine when these Big Boys are returning Web Pages based on Old Information?
 
I didn't quite understand what you were getting at :) but if you press Ctrl-U you will see what the search engine sees. Unfortunately some people are quite rude in their code and just try to get hits.
 
I do share your frustration with google's results sometimes. However, google is only being paid for the small fairly unobtrusive ads at the top and side of your search, which, because of Google's policy of proper content for ads, are usually not bad.

The rest of the problem with google is down to its inability to filter out rubbish sites that have been tailored to rank highly with google. This isn't something that google gets paid for, and so it is of no benefit to them to show these sites. I do believe that they have introduced user rating of sites in their searches to try to improve the quality of their results.
 
Google was perfect until people figured out how to game their system to get their websites in front. I have better search results from Google then I do from yahoo. It would be nice if there was more compatition. Many years ago I used a commercial program called Capernicus, it was a multi engined search program that used any and all search engines to mine data for you and sort out the duplicates. Capernicus would allow you to select wich search engines to use, and to save the searchers/results for later use if needed. There used to be more options for searches and the results were often quite different. These days you have to enter quite a bit of "code" to get the results you need even with google.
 
My point was - Google doesn't produce better results, if anything their worse than Yahoo because I typed in a Search Criteria ("Bulgaria"+"Mountain Music") and the #1 pick Google Came up with was for a Website which currently doesn't even have the Word "Bulgaria" in it!!

Yahoo is almost as Bad - though it had a few other top selections followed by in the #4th or #5th Placing the site I mention above (which Google made #1).

So at the moment it's like the Search Engines are running a ground because their picking those sites based on old out-of-date information.
 
So what does that mean?

Are people with websites registering their sites under Google with words like "Lovely Ladies", etc, etc and then after Google & Yahoo has pick it-up those sites they change the site to "Antique Clocks" or something totally unrelated?
 
Lawrence Woodman said:
The rest of the problem with google is down to its inability to filter out rubbish sites that have been tailored to rank highly with google. This isn't something that google gets paid for, and so it is of no benefit to them to show these sites. I do believe that they have introduced user rating of sites in their searches to try to improve the quality of their results.
Click to expand...

I concur. Not being an anarcho-syndicalist, my main beef with Google isn't that they make a profit, its that their search engine is broken.

If you are searching Google for the latest Celebutard pics it works. If you happen to be looking for something semi-obscure like the drivers for an 8-bit expansion card your typical results are hundreds of links to sites with non-English character sets containing alphabetical lists of random search terms and plenty-o-trojans.

"Don't Be Evil" my sweet bippy. They might pull off Chaotic Neutral at best...
 
CP/M User said:
So what does that mean?

Are people with websites registering their sites under Google with words like "Lovely Ladies", etc, etc and then after Google & Yahoo has pick it-up those sites they change the site to "Antique Clocks" or something totally unrelated?
Click to expand...

You can't really do that.

Google spiders re-scan sites in the search list regularly (some many times a day - like these forums) and they will ruin the results of sites that pull those stunts (or who have hidded keywords, mismatched META tags or any number of other crap that SEO gamers pull.)

Google isn't perfect, but they do a good job for most topics and they are free.

The only real competition I've seen try is cuil and, frankly, they sucked. They've gotten much better, but they still don't quite get it.
 
Erik said:
You can't really do that.

Google spiders re-scan sites in the search list regularly (some many times a day - like these forums) and they will ruin the results of sites that pull those stunts (or who have hidded keywords, mismatched META tags or any number of other crap that SEO gamers pull.)
Click to expand...

I'd have to add the caveat that it seems to me they do this on sites with higher hit counts and less or not at all on sites that are obscure or that block bots accessing certain portions of their site.

Erik said:
The only real competition I've seen try is cuil and, frankly, they sucked. They've gotten much better, but they still don't quite get it.
Click to expand...


Cuil has gotten better. Now they allow you to find results for "Cuil sucks" and "Sergey Brin"
 
One search engine I used to use frequently was Dogpile. I liked the way they handled boolean search terms better than google did when they were just starting up. Now google has gotten so big that many of the smaller search sites have seemed to just die off. Dogpile is still out there but their search engine seems to be dated.
 
I figured they had a background of random names in white on a white background so none of it shows up to the user but does on a search engine?
 
I use Google normally but reading this thread reminded me there are other search engines out there. If you can't find it with Google it certainly doesn't hurt to try others.

I just found some information on Yahoo I couldn't find on a Goggle search (or at least didn't appear in the higher rankings).

Tez
 
Okay, okay. I might have been a bit lazy earlier having a search termed "Bulgaria"+"Mountain Singers" - clearly though Google has a problem with that cause the top pages I checked out just now, didn't have any mention of the word Bulgaria. But when I tried Bulgaria+"Mountain Singers" I got pages with a little bit more relavance - pages which had the word Bulgaria in them and Mountain Singers in them. Unfortunately it didn't really help me - because in one spot it would have Bulgaria and in an entirely different spot it would have "Mountain Singers" - and when I tried "Bulgaria Mountain Singers" - no results for that! :-o I was trying to find a traditional name for those people who climb the Bulgarian Mountains and Sing to their loved ones! Guess I need to widen my search criteria! :-o
 
I tried Cuil their first day out. It was SO BAD as to be unusable! For tech stuff, Yahoo frequently does a superior job over Google. As a result, I have gotten in the habit of looking at 2 or 3 pages on Google, then doing exactly the same procedure on Yahoo.
 
chuckcmagee said:
For tech stuff, Yahoo frequently does a superior job over Google. As a result, I have gotten in the habit of looking at 2 or 3 pages on Google, then doing exactly the same procedure on Yahoo.
Click to expand...

This is what I'll be doing too, from now on.

Tez
 
Unknown_K: I figured they had a background of random names in white on a white background so none of it shows up to the user but does on a search engine?
Click to expand...
You really need to look at the source to see how search engines work. Most browsers let you View > Page Source, or just Ctrl-U. Look at "desciption" and "keywords" near the top by "meta name=" in front of it. That is where the information is supposed to be put. Some people are real idiots and put piles of unrelated stuff there, including unrelated words and repetitions. That doesn't work with Google. I find it interesting how a small site like my http://coalmont.net which gets very little traffic, is very well indexed by Google and comes up with the slighest hint. Look at my "head" and you will see why: it is informative, direct, and honest. Thats what works.

On the other hand I know other people with sites that could easily get more traffic and in a greedy effort to beat the system and get lots of hits they are dishonest in their approach and the "net" result is that you can't find them on Google. hahahah. Actually, even my home page which is of interest to about five people and relevant to one, :p can easily be found using Google. Like others, I have some dislike of Google, but I gotta say, it's a great search engine.

I just went to the Cuil site and they are functional now. They weren't when they started. So I tried the big test. "Coalmont septic" (we are having a septic issue) and it gives me a New Coalmont Courier (my site) article - that's good - with a picture from another article of a guy that died recently - bad. Google doesn't pull stunts like that and neither does Yahoo.

I mentioned SCROOGLE earlier - has nobody tried it? Or is it a non-mentionable in this thread? I would have thought it would be right on topic.
 
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