Learn How Google Works: in Gory Detail
As nice as Google is, I am finding it to be somewhat less useful these days. I don’t know how much of that is from changes in Google, or because of changes in website “strategy.” In the early days of the internet, many web pages were all one page, and a search could give a hit because the terms all appeared, but in disparate topics located in different parts of the page. Then people learned they could/should link to different pages, and they segregated content to reduce load times, especially when pictures were being included and everyone had dialup. A long load time is bad for traffic — people are impatient (probably even for porn. Or especially for porn). But now we’re back to large pages, probably because enough people now have high speed access. So a search on reducing government waste will get you news or blog links that have stories on weight loss, politics and trash removal all on the same page. But some of it is due to the way Google has changed the way they do a search.
I am occasionally annoyed by Google because of the expansive use of synonyms and including different verb tenses, which lead to many more useless searches. Part of that is because it’s a very Microsoftian “I know what you want better than you do;” I haven’t gotten used to putting single words in quotes because it didn’t used to be necessary. (A blog search on swansont and some other term(s) should give my blog posts, but now I get masses of hits that include swan song and swansong, which I find to be less than useful. No, I typed what I meant, dammit. You used to ask did you mean “X” when you thought it was a typo.)
Another annoyance is searching on multiple terms and getting hits that don’t include all the search terms in the link. No, I wasn’t kidding about wanting to find that word in the text. It’s not optional.
OK, so I’m not crazy (well, maybe I am, but not about this). I thought I had noticed Google search results were getting less and less useful but thought that maybe it was just me. This is a bummer since I have recently switched to using Chrome which integrates Google searches (for obvious reasons) in a seamless way.
You can get rid of the synonyms and some of the don’t-include-all-the-terms by putting a plus sign before each such word — “yes, I really do want to search for this”.
Also use double quotes to limit Google’s creativity. Enclose words or phrases to constrain the search. More then ten words ignores the overage. MS Bing – when you are not smart enough to parse a search string and don’t care about the results’ quality. A “minus” sign with no space excludes a single word or a double-quoted phrase.
Microsoft Word is sphincter extrusion. When I drag, I want what I dragged. I don’t want pseudo-clevernesses with spaces and whole word auto-inclusion. Wincrap 7 is a file and subdirectory structure from Hell – and even ZTREE smothers.
That’s very interesting, I hadn’t looked at it that way before (the difference between webpages now and then).
Personally, I still find google just as useful as ever, but maybe that just means that I don’t search for very convoluted things.
The term we used to use was dwimmy, as in Do What I Mean.
Yeah, I’ve been surrounding search words with quotes for a while now. Google is still awfully useful, but you have to look at more stuff to find what you need.