"Turning off Google search results indirection": http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/turning-off...
[1] As I can read in several articles in the internet, but can't find an authoritative source.
*"Useless crap" is context-sensitive, of course -- no disrespect toward Android intended, but I go to the trouble of including "Cocoa" in my search Google shouldn't be giving me pages that don't even contain that word. It might be different if it were smart enough to just give you Objective C or iOS-focused pages that included "Webview", but not Cocoa, since there's at least some probability that those pages would be of interest. However, it wasn't that smart.
Fantastic! That’s one of the things that has been bothering me on Google lately.
Here's an example (but not my exact query). "iPhone 4" will match pages with "iPhone" and "for."
For the love of god, yes.
I just did a search where Google conveniently decided to substitute "bike" and "bicycle" for the word "cycle" (as in "a series of repeated events")
Sigh.
> More precise detection of old pages. [launch codename "oldn23", project codename “Freshness"] This change improves detection of stale pages in our index by relying on more relevant signals. As a result, fewer stale pages are shown to users.
Hopefully this means fewer instances of searching for code help and seeing prominent results from 2005.
That, and the new "Verbatim' option, are really good news. There are also some five (10% of the entire list) timely tweaks to synonyms.
All in all, it seems Google listens and tries to improve its service, which has become rather paternalistic lately ("you wrote X, but actually mean Y", no I don't!). Well done.
I particularily like the indexing of symbols, it will make searching for C# results easier.
Maybe it has something to do with its search results coming from Microsoft.
brilliant.
Also funny that they launched two Synonym features that appear to be be the same feature described in different words.
Some are almost certainly checking their email or doing other things – despite the small text insert that tries to suggest they're all looking at advanced analytics about the proposed changes.
Very few speak or seem to be in a physical (or status) position where they could speak, though maybe as the topic changes, some of the giant peanut gallery gets engaged.
Altogether, it fits a lot of meeting antipatterns. When I see perplexing things like this about Google, I have to wonder: is this a counterintuitive part of the secret sauce, or an indulgence whose cost is covered up by their gusher of quasi-monopolistic profits?
Most people, if they don't have a strong interest in tech & the Internet, only see the surface PR efforts, without having the background to notice that they're in fact heavily orchestrated PR.
The strategy certainly seems to be working thus far - but I feel they might be pushing it a bit recently. More people seem to be noticing and thinking about it.
Take a look at when google chooses to release news, especially "fun" news like robotic cars. They are great at the art of PR - which is not really a surprise if you own a tinfoil hat, because you never know - maybe they can get leading indicators through query & behavior mining across their dataset? :)
I would have expected something a little bit broader; an algorithm that attempts to automatically parse score results for all major sports based on the pages they pull results from, or something to that effect. The former is way easier, and probably a whole lot more accurate, that the later, but it removes a little bit of the sex from the whole process. It also highlights how much work must be involved in building the snippet generators for a site like google.
which is almost certainly a broader algorithm that tries to semantically parse out factual information.
http://frontrow.espn.go.com/2011/08/espn-google-and-microdat...
ESPN indicated they worked with Google for baseball, but maybe they completed the work for all sports:
"Going forward our team is planning to create microdata-enhanced results for other sports like football, basketball, hockey, and soccer."
- Spinners hit hard - Text link sellers hit hard
:)
EDIT: That was my #fail at answering the question with spun text. Duskwuff did it well!
Really? Who picks these codenames?
