Google has many cute gimmicks built in, no doubt. But honestly I've been frustrated at Google's results as of late. Google simply has been SEO'd to death. Plus, uncommon phrases are completely swamped by more common similar ones. Search is just waiting to be blown wide open again, at least in some specific cases.
My only real beef with Google search at the moment is that it seems to give too much weight to "current events." If there is some big piece of news (like the recent school shooting), it funnels you towards that result. I was looking for some statistics on suburban schools, and a search for 'suburban schools' returned 9 results about the shooting that occurred the day before, and result from ehow.com
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It would be pretty cool if we could have knobs that would control the weighting of different factors - news, wiki, help websites, etc.
I guess I don't really know how it works though, so maybe that's not very feasible (or maybe it'd be too easy to game?).
With sort of the opposite result for tech searches. It's very common to get links to blog and forum posts from several years ago when it's far more likely that information posted in the last year would be more helpful.
!!!! Awesome! I can't believe I never noticed that. This 100% solves this specific case for me, since I can just tailor the time range to before the current event occurred. Thanks so much :)
I feel like they have gotten a lot better over the last few months. I guess it depends what subjects you search for. For a while I thought "personal filter" was a good idea but lately I don't feel a need.
I've been having the same experience. It's all too clear people are gaming Google to get on the front page. A few years ago, I never had to really search for stuff I wanted on Google. Now, I really have to weed out a lot of useless results to find what I want.
Would love to see some example queries to debug if you guys have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)
If this a genuine request for feedback, I will happily share my experience with the query "learn chinese".
Result #1 (-tools.com) is part of an interlinked series of clone sites. Result #2 (clear-.com) has zero original content. Result #3 (-wen.com) is decent. Result #4 (-mm.com) is low-value. Result #5 (instant-.com) is a spam site with no content. Result #6 (rosetta-) is OK given the strength of the brand but is not the most obvious choice. Results #7 and #8 are the exact same page. Result #9 is a spam site with no content. The in-lined videos are meaningless and low quality.
Things get worse on page two, with almost all of the sites that rank, ranking because they spam. Compare the results with what you'll get searching the Apple podcast directory (which lists stuff people actually use and cuts spam by actually requiring content) and you'll see the quality of the offerings and the user experience is literally night and day. None of the highly-rated stuff there shows up in Google.
So assuming the results should be the leading free and or paid services or resources for learning Chinese, Google has a total fail, with not a single relevant result on its first page, and only a single hit on page two. If I'm looking for sites to spam me or put me into a high-pressure sales funnel, I basically hit bingo though.
