Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matt_Cutts | Hacker News Reader

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing. Most feedback posts don't give us enough specifics to go back and figure out what went wrong and how to make things better.

We do have a "Give us feedback" link at the bottom of each search results page which does some neat AJAX-y things. But even then, we get a lot of "Hi, I'm trying to find my great-great-great-grandfather. He last name was Smith. Thanks!" sort of submissions. Also submissions like "My computer keeps humming. I opened it up and cleaned out the dust, but it still hums. Do I need to clean out the dust again?" And some submissions that say "I would like to rank #1 for all my keywords. How do I do that?"

I've wondered whether a Chrome extension or something similar would give higher quality data for spam or bug reports. It might be worth thinking about offering something like that.

View on HN

People in Google's search quality team really do like to read posts like this as long as someone mentions the searches they were doing.

Okay, here goes. Lately I have been doing a lot of C# searches. Google suggest strips out the hash (#) from the suggest items, so I keep getting faked out by likely C programming matches. Can you please stop stripping off the "#"? Otherwise, I'll need to attach a hot wire to my down arrow to break the habit. Thanks.

I'm pretty sure that several search quality people are reading this thread now, but I'll try to mention this explicitly to people. Thanks for the suggestion.

Normally Google doesn't allows searches for punctuation, because doing so would swell the index size a lot for very little return in terms of helpful searches. But since we're engineers, we do search some punctuation, e.g. underscores so you can search for sprintf_s, and terms like C# and F#. I'll ask whether the # can carry through into Suggest.

You should really automate this feedback process by mining the web for examples where people complain about Google quality AND they mention the search queries themselves :-)

Thanks, nhebb. ntoshev, now you're thinking like a Google employee. :)

You're a Good Egg, Matt.

Why not ask permission to transmit the last few searches and a snapshot of the results. I mean, I usually only hit "give feedback" when i'm not finding the stuff I want. You'll probably be able to discern a lot from that.

The "give feedback" form does automatically populate the feedback form with what you were searching for when you clicked to give feedback. We haven't tried transmitting several searches because people would probably complain, and it's not clear how much previous searches would help. But when we revamped the feedback form, that's one of the big wins we got from making it dynamic instead of a generic form.

I wonder if it would help to give some feedback to the ones that you actually took into account?

I think I've tried more than a couple of times to give some feedback about the search results. Seeing that nothing happened, and getting nothing but an automated response, I've stopped doing that.

Reporting flashing ads to the ad team worked better, they were removed later the same day.

One of the problems with replying to every piece of feedback is that a link on Google's search page--even a link that many people don't notice--gets a huge volume of feedback. And the resulting feedback can be pretty unhelpful ("I lost my cat. I think you should build a search for lost cats.") So we don't have the resources to reply to all of those. Personally, I would like if we offered a lower-volume feedback method with a higher hit rate of good feedback. Hacker News is acting as the prequalifier in this instance, but I find that people annoyed enough to blog often provide good feedback too.

Overall I agree with you, but even if we had that channel, many times the feedback would be: "Yup, that's a bad set of search results. We'll try to come up with a way to make it better, but it might be a while. Getting an algorithm to do better on this search will be hard."

I have given feedback on search for "BMTC" not returning the official website of BMTC (bmtcinfo.com). (2-3 months back). But the search results haven't changed since then.

I did a quick check, and that website has some issues. Here's a wget on bmtcinfo.com:

$ wget http://bmtcinfo.com/ --2010-09-14 09:01:43-- http://bmtcinfo.com/ Resolving bmtcinfo.com... failed: Name or service not known. wget: unable to resolve host address `bmtcinfo.com'

The url http://bmtcinfo.com/ just doesn't work in a browser or with wget. And trying to fetch the "www" version of the website, it does a 302 redirect to a deeper url. 302 redirects are the ones that don't pass PageRank. The last time we tried to crawl the page, we got an error--probably from the non-www version. I'll see what we can do to find this site better, but returning errors instead of content to Googlebot really hurts that effort.

By the way, we provide a free webmaster console that would let the owner of this domain self-diagnose these issues. The "Fetch as Googlebot" feature lets the owner send Googlebot to fetch a url on their site and see what Googlebot saw, including errors and redirects. If the owner of bmtcinfo.com were to use that tool, they'd probably notice the errors pretty quickly.

Thanks a lot for the reply. I have passed on this info to bmtcinfo.com through their feedback form.

If you get through to them, it looks like a couple DNS servers in their chain have been serving us NXDOMAINs. Point them to sb[12].mooo.com, hosted on afraid.org, and ask them to let Googlebot in. :)

Almost 2 weeks over. No response from them so far :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com