Google, These Aren’t Really The Best Answers For Users. | Hacker News Reader

Google, These Aren’t Really The Best Answers For Users.

techcrunch.com

76 pointsobilgic44 comments

TechCrunch: The pages using Google Places are unfairly being put at the top.

Another explanation: The savviest webmasters (who promote their sites best, know SEO, etc.) are the first to play with a new tool like Google places, which is why you see their pages so highly represented in the top results.

This is another case of correlation vs. causation, something that journalists seem incapable of grasping.

It is more than just places. Search for 'windows 7' and one the top results is a google product page that is nothing more than an aggregation of others pages. On it's face this seems fine, but google tells others that they don't want their search results linking to what is essentially another pages search results. Unless of course that other page of search results is a google product.

Here's another example, I've always dominated a vanity search for my name (it's an uncommon name). One day out of the blue I wasn't the top result, some with my name was simply because they put a video on YouTube and being a google product it gets special treatment.

> because they put a video on YouTube and being a google product it gets special treatment

How do you know it gets any special treatment? Didn't it occur to you that because so many sites link to YouTube it can be perfectly natural that it has a high PageRank?

I didn't explain the situation well. It didn't show up as an organic result, it showed up as a "videos for xxx".

But, the product pages are a much better example. I should have left it at that. They are showing links to their product pages that are essentially a page of aggregated search results. This is something they actively try to prevent when the aggregated search results pages belong to someone else.

> The savviest webmasters (who promote their sites best, know SEO, etc.) are the first to play with a new tool like Google places, which is why you see their pages so highly represented in the top results.

By savviest webmasters you mean Google, since they generate the pages. Yes, they have very good SEO. Nonetheless, in many places this is deemed unfair competition

I'm not sure how that answered the parent's point. SlyShy claimed that the pages who are at the top of search results are more likely to be tech savvy, and therefore more likely to use Google Places (and therefore have a link to Google Places next to their search result). I think that's an interesting alternative explanation, although obviously we can't really tell whether the parent's interpretation is more accurate than TechCrunch's or not without looking at data.

I don't understand what you meant though. Can you clarify please?

and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but don't a lot of those places results look autogenerated? if you click on the more results link, every single local result has a places link.

I think the author jumped the gun.

Just because they're auto-generated doesn't change the fact they're taking traffic that previously would have gone to another site and pointing at their pages.

so they're not evil?

Google? Or journalists who don't follow basic logic rules?

Don't be so harsh, I think Eric is onto something. Or do you think it is normal, that for the "NY Chiropractor" search, first 7 "organic" results are listed in Places, while all the rest are not? That's clearly a bias and now we see the search results are not sorted by relevance, as Google always claimed to be the case.

You assume it's a bias, but you provide no compelling argument that the results on the first page aren't the best results for the query. And neither does the Tech Crunch writer.

No kidding.

Searched for: "ny chiropractor". First page results: all NYC chiropractors. Seems like accurate, relevant results to me. Meanwhile, the first 4 Bing results are: a college, an association, an actual NYC chiropractor, and a Wikipedia page about the college.

I find the high-rank-due-to-emphasis-on-online-presence theory far more likely, actually. Especially as they seem to be targeting Google SEO.

Even if the theory that "smart webmasters use Google tools" is true, this indicates that Google is creating products that make it easier to gamble the system. This doesn't sound like it is helping web users, just the opposite.

> the search results are not sorted by relevance

I don't think it's safe to assume that enrollment into places has no effect on real-world relevance.

I'm pretty disappointed with Google's search these days. 99% of the time I just want plain old text search results. No pictures, videos, maps, javascript previews, etc. Just the text.

Don't forget their awful, automatic broadmatching for organic results.

Today I was searching for "(vendor name) promo code"

And back came results about programming. Because code, when not a noun, is a verb for "to program." It's just awful. Sometimes getting no results is more useful than getting broader results that I need to parse just to establish I'm not going to find what I'm searching for.

If you let google personalize your results, then this probably happened because "code" usually means programming...for you.

well I'm not going to call you wrong, because I don't know the vendor you were searching for, but in trying several different vendors it seems that google is automatically looking for both "promo" and "promotion", and it's hard to tell, but maybe "coupon" as well.

in any case, it's clear google doesn't think I'm looking for source code.

I recently started using duckduckgo.com and i'm extremely impressed with the results - clean design, no seo spam from content farms, even useful for german queries. Overall i may get less results (just assuming, if true i didn't notice), but they are definitely the significant and important ones.

Tried http://www.goosh.org/ ?

If you really just want text results, with no shinies (shineys? shinys?), there's gotta be something out there that does this. If not, maybe a browser extension is in order? It'd have an easier time cleaning stuff up. I could add it to my ever-lengthening todo list...

Sounds like you want to use https://ssl.scroogle.org/

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-go...

It would be cool if there was a lynx like browser extension.

Depending on your browser, there kinda is:

disable CSS, javascript, images, and plugins. :) (though it seems Chrome doesn't have this anywhere that's simple to do...)

Agreed. Google has fucked away simplicity.

I'm fond of duckduckgo. The author is a HN member to boot.

This is a classic example of TechCrunch trolling.

1) They search for places in NYC and seem very surprised that the place information is associated with the search results.

2) They claim that locations and phone numbers are not useful. I think most users would disagree.

3) They suggest that the fact that place information is associated with a search result implies that somebody had to pay. This is false, information about most places is imported automatically from yellow pages (although owners can claim them).

4) They imply that Google is unfair with sites like Yelp and Citysearch, but the screenshot posted with the article clearly shows that place results are linked to external sites.

But they also imply, and that I find a bit worrying, that the organic local search results might not be sorted primarily by relevance, as Google always claimed to be so.

Ok, it might be just a coincidence, that the 7 most relevant results for "NY Chiropractors" are the websites which registered with Google service called Places, and all the others ranked below #7 just happen to not registered on Places. But what is the probability this being the case?

It just looks like the websites who registered with Places got preferential treatment in search results, and that was the main point of the article (which you didn't mention in your comment). And this I don't find to be trolling, but a legitimate concern.

If you look closely at the Places results, you'll see that many of them have not yet been claimed by their owners. It was automatically generated from public information such as Yellow Pages.

What it means is that Chiropractors who don't have a web presence can still have information about them (i.e., address and phone information) returned via a search result. Isn't that a good thing for the Chiropractors?

I don't follow the logic here. Google claims that these are the best answers for users and at first glance, I'd have to agree.

I tried the same query on other search engines:

1) Bing corrected me, assuming I meant "ny chiropractic" and 3 of the top 5 results are for chiropractic schools/organizations.

2) Duck Duck Go doesn't correct me but provides less information in terms of reviews, approximate location, links to Yelp, etc.

Sure, both of those show different results, but how can we even begin to quantify that they're "better" in some way just because they're organic? The very first result on Duck Duck Go looks like spam to me.

It's the same thing as if I was looking for a taco in my town. Both Bing and Duck Duck Go tell me about the three local Taco Bells but never mention the two Mexican restaurants nearby that Google points out in the Places section. Google doesn't even mention them in their organic results.

If I was looking for a decent taco, Google's the only search engine that'd get me there apparently.

One very good idea for competing with google would be to replicate google a few years ago, just with the necessary extra spam protection.

One example off the top of my head: If keyword doesn't exist in the page I'm normally not interested, even if other pages links to it by that keyword.

"One very good idea for competing with google would be to replicate google a few years ago, just with the necessary extra spam protection."

Google actually did that for their 10th anniversary: they set up a copy of their 2001 index with the old ranking algorithm and old UI and let people play with it. It was only up for a month (there's a heavy maintenance cost for playing with code that old), but if you image search for [google 2001 index], you can see a bunch of screenshots.

I just played with it down to about page 6 of the image results (now there's a feature that didn't exist in 2001...), and didn't find a single query where I preferred the results & UI of then over the ones now.

I feel the same way. These days, junk results are the norm. Google Instant was a funny product launch to me because it sort of proved that the results aren't good anymore and making it faster to search is a stop gap.

I have read this article to the end, also read the WSJ article [1] (mentioned at the beginning) and wondered what value / knowledge does this TC take added to what there is at the WSJ original article already.

Seriously, next time, I suggest, just TC author should tweet about the WSJ's article and attach the "attractive" title to it and that is all to it.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870405870457601...

I don't really get it, places helps Google deliver the most locally relevant data, which seems useful looking for a business like this. The preferred alternative is to infer similar information from other similar services online?

Things like citysearch and yelp are even built into the places listing, seems better than just having the one that has the best SEO visible.

If Google compromises search result quality for revenue, users will switch away in the same way they switch from AltaVista et al to Google.

It is within the Google ethos not to fuck with their best selection. They understand that their success was from showing the best results. I doubt they will screw it up.

Screaming to the government to do something about it is just useless. If it is crap, it will die.

When there was AltaVista, all search engines were kind of the same, Altavista was perhaps just a little bit better. Google was the new kid in the block and made things way better.

Now however, all search engines are the same again. Unless there is a new kid in the block, who do you switch to?

It made perfect sense for Microsoft to include a browser with its Operating System. Users liked Internet Explorer and its market share came close to 100%. Nonetheless, the EU fined Microsoft around 2 billion for violating antitrust laws and forced them to introduce the browser selection screen. Math or no math, user satisfaction or not, the same thing could happen to Google.

Google's mission statement is to "organize the world’s information".

This is another milestone in realizing the full scope of that vision.

Long term I really wonder what, if any, search arbitrage businesses are going to exist.

Companies like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Mahalo, lead generators (eg mortgage), etc are going to have a rough time of it a few years down the road.

Ref:

http://www.google.com/corporate/

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/is-google-entering-...

>Either way, the message is clear to local businesses: list your profile in Google Places and you will have a better shot at appearing at the top of the first search results page.

Correlation vs causation: correlation is pretty clearly demonstrated, cause/effect is not. Maybe sites which appear near the top are more interested in their online presence (actually, that's pretty much guaranteed), in which case of course they're going to have a Place page. That doesn't imply places with Places are being favored.

Are they favoring displaying their own links, which they can inject into results (and this doesn't imply they cause the result to rank higher!) more easily than, say, a Yelp link? Yeah. Probably for that reason. Is this unfair? Maybe... though saying it is simply because the site you are looking for comes up higher than the Yelp review just means they have a good search engine.

All I know is that Google's search results are becoming more and more cluttered. Like almost every other Internet based company, greed is ruining their product.

Google is a business and so as long it isn't illegal, they have the right to do it. Whether it's smart in the long term, profit-wise, compared to short-term, is another issue. But you often see companies start making BDC (Big Dumb Company) kinds of decisions after they reach a certain size and culture and market/feature maturity -- they run out of places to grow their revenue in less slimy ways, or at least, they think they have.

Who voted this down and why? Down-voting is not a tool through which you demonstrate your disagreement with someone's opinion.

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