Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches | Hacker News Reader

Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches

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86 pointstopcat3165 comments

Has anyone else noticed Google making a lot of autocorrection mistakes recently? I don't mind the traditional "did you mean" links, but I've been getting redirected to pages for different queries, with a "did you mean [what you actually typed]" link.

It's especially a problem with programming because a lot of words that are "wrong" are actually acronyms or strange library names.

Yes, all the time. I pretty much never expect Google to search for what I asked the first time around now.

Yes. It is incredibly frustrating.

There's a fine line between being helpful and taking control from the user. Google used to be safely on the helpful side of the line. Now more and more SERPs are wasting my time by making me refine my search with qualifiers to ensure I actually get what I want.

I think that google is losing sight of what made them popular to begin with.

[within reason] Every workshop on the planet has a hammer in it. This is because hammers are very simple, they never break, they never behave unexpectedly, they're highly useful, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do as perfectly as anybody can imagine. Hammers are the perfect tools; something that should have been idolized in Brave New World.

Google was a hammer for a long time. It wasn't even a question that google would be the default search engine for everybody who knew anything about anything. Google did search really well, behaved exactly as advertised, rarely broke.

It was perfect. It was a hammer.

It feels like google (overall, I don't just mean search) is losing their grasp on this.

Stuff like charts API. Maybe it's just me, but the new version of this is annoying. It's some javascripty nonsense that feels complicated. It's a laser-guided, nuclear-powered gryoscopically stabilized, diamond-tipped screwdriver that can also make coffee and fold your laundry. You could build a submarine with it.

But it's also got an instruction manual that is a foot thick.

The old api was just: <img src='https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc>;

or something similar.

And now I can't +term, they took away the links to "cached" versions of the pages, things autocomplete (incorrectly), it assumes I meant something that I didn't, it wants to integrate into a social network, etc. etc.

Google...you're starting to feel a little microsofty. Are you okay?

I wish Google catered more to geeks.

I understand how Google indexes the web. Let me control my own queries. Give us geeks the ability to enable/disable freshness, even if it means appending &fresh=0 to the URL

They already give you tools all the way to an exact date range search! How much more control do you want.

I didn't realize it when I posted.

Here is Matt Cutts' explanation of the date options:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/useful-google-feature-better-d...

I still wish there a sort by date option, for when I'm trying to find the oldest occurrence of something...

In fact there is. You have to click on one of the other date options before it shows up. For instance, http://www.google.com/webhp?&ie=UTF-8#q=occupy+oakland&#... shows results from the last three days, sorted by date.

Huh, that's good to know. Unfortunately what I was looking for was a reverse sort by date...

You can still use Image Charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image/

The cached links are still there. They just got moved to the preview page. I assume not enough people used them for the amount of clutter they created in the SERPs.

thanks for mentioning the cache links, I thought they were gone and used the "Cache:URL" query. I don't like the preview pane, never paid any attention to it (actually, I think it's pretty stupid :-)...

The A players are getting old or bored, the B players are trickling in.

Or the PHBs are taking over.

It is a bit like small dogs shouting at the caravan, but if I had to express a concern about Google, it would be more about their new design, the replacement of default scrollbar, the autoloading of next images, etc.

If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.

Is there a link to "tell google that this autocorrect was wrong" somewhere under the search box?

Because that might be helpful.

They probably keep track of whether you click the "No, really search for my search terms" link.

Ah, this is one of those situations where you'd love to remember an example or more, but everything you try actually works - then sometime a few days later it happens!

Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially offensive.

That's pretty funny :-). Well, the Internet is for porn first, code later...

Thanks!

I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly:

  true? scheme

Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

  +true? scheme

Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay.

  "true?" scheme

Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme".

  +"true?" scheme

Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.

Most punctuation isn't indexed. A few terms like C++ and C# are special-cased, and a hyphen usually works, but mostly you just can't search for anything punctuation-related for programming. I was recently trying to learn the difference between the <%= and <%# tags in ASP.NET and Google couldn't even understand the query.

Not that it's an easy problem. How are the spiders and indexers supposed to distinguish "true?" as a programming lexeme versus just an interrogative sentence that ends with "true"?

Sometimes we forget that Google and the other search engines aren't a byte-for-byte search across the entire web. The pages are all tokenized and indexed, with most punctuation dropped since that is indeed the more common usage case. You don't want a search for a word to miss out on pages where the word was glued to quotes or a comma or something.

You don't have a million yourself? The spell check fires 5 times a day for me and 4 of them are wrong.

Would love to see some of the examples if you have them. Try here if you have search history on: https://www.google.com/history/

I tried this, and began to doubt my stat -- I saw no instances of the problem. But then I tried to repro the problem and I see that history doesn't record it.

E.g. search for [barack obam] (typo intentional). Then when it autocorrects, click the "I meant what I typed" link. Now look at your history: it doesn't mark that in any way.

I came across this one yesterday when I was looking for more information about something mentioned on HN:

    Search:  carmack +zfail gpl
      Date:  2011-11-02
    Result:  Bad autocorrect; Plus operator broke
    """
    Showing results for carmack fail gpl
    Search instead for carmack zfail gpl
    """

Because the plus operator is broken my final search ended up being `carmack "z-fail" OR "zfail" gpl` because different sources included or excluded the dash. Note that I think it's good that quotes are still exact and they shouldn't do the synonym search, but this is something the plus operator would have worked on, if I remember correctly.

moultano: notice this "fresh" search https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courier

every page in the top 10 organic results were coming from pages that were either added or updated within 2011 except for the youtube results. those 2 videos were added in 2009.

i also noticed that your youtube videoes were higher in the results than articles from gizmodo, arstechnica, engadget, Time magazine and whole slew of other articles that were released 2 days ago.

just asking...

Here's one I just came across.. The search term: where to buy ties in boston

The 4th & 5th results are about car "tires"

A recent example, searching for eb_row returns results for 'eyebrow' And the worst thing? The search page is without even the "Did you mean" links!

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=e...

I can't imagine Google devs are happy with this. Cmon Google, let us geeks in on the internal search that your devs use. Host it at geek.google.com or whatever. Probably won't happen since geeks don't click on ads much, and Google is cutting down on dev friendly side projects like code.google.com these days.

Yeah, not even the quotes help in some cases, and I expect Google to show me results that contain the exact word I'm searching for, no matter if it thinks I misspelled it (it's like the algorithm says "let me correct that for you, stupid" :-)...

They probably make more money from ads by autocorrecting.

What I dislike the most from recent updates is the preview feature. I find it completely gets in my way, and it's very easy to unintentionally make it preview something, when I just want to scan the results. Does anyone else find that feature useful?

I never understood the usefulness of the preview feature. The only time I find it marginally interesting is when a website is currently down or had recently been taken offline. Though, I find the "cache:" query more useful in those cases anyway.

The preview window does pop-up unexpectedly for me as well. I guess my mouse pointer wanders over to the right side of the search result every once in a while, triggering the preview.

I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone understood it, now it's gone. Boo.

The cached link is still there. Look for it on the page preview.

Can't we just have it back where it was?

I don't at all, and find it incredibly distracting to have movement on the entire right half o the page when I'm just trying to scan the search result text.

The preview panel is useful because Bing has it. It's like Google has set out to ape anything Bing does so the only difference is the result quality.

- Bing added a main search page background image, so Google adds one (but only if you're logged in).

- Bing changed the image search to pack images together with hover for info, so Google made theirs do the same.

- Bing added image search parameters like size, style, etc, so Google adds them too.

- Bing added preview panel, so Google added it too.

- Bing moved cache links into the preview, so Google moves cache links into the preview.

...iirc Bing did all these things and more first before Google.

Yeah, it's just... stupid. It would've actually been more useful if it was smaller (like Windows 7 taskbar previews), not take a whole third of the page. Thankfully, it's not automatically showing up anymore (at least for me), so it's cool...

The following CSS should disable preview and put the Cached and Similar links back into the correct spot. I use UserCSS in Opera, not sure what to use in other browsers but I know there are solutions for custom CSS available:

    .vspib { display: none !important; } /* This is the preview specific line */

    .vshid {
        display: inline !IMPORTANT;
        padding-left: .7em !important;
    }
    .vshid > a {
        color: #1122cc !important;
        text-decoration: none !important;
    }
    .vshid > a:hover { text-decoration: underline !important; }
    .vshid > a:visited { color: #6611cc; }

This next bit of CSS should puts the URL back below the snippet text. It works for most result types but there are a few where it's buggy, for example any results that show how many people "+1'd" a URL:

    li.g .s,
    li.g.videobox .s > table.ts > tbody > tr > td > div
        { padding-bottom: 1.4em !important; }  /* Make room for the moved URL */
    li.g.videobox .s { padding-bottom: .5em !important; }
    li.g.videobox .s > table td > div { position: relative !important; }
    li.g .s > .f.kv, li.g.videobox .s > table .kvm {
        position: absolute !important;
        bottom: 0 !important;
    }

I have Instant disabled so the above CSS may or may not play well with Instant enabled.

This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand.

I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages.

I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.

I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in which "freshness" would not improve quality.

Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley Effect" or new is always better. IMO.

The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this specific change is overly relevant.

I hope this works. Searches for error messages and the like are often cluttered with results from 2009 or earlier, describing troubleshooting steps that are out of date or unnecessary. At this point I add the current year to the end of any given troubleshooting search – and even that isn't always enough.

I run into this problem all the time. I usually hit the "More search tools" link and then limit my search to the past year or so (depending on the issue).

Also including specific version numbers helps as well.. but maybe this update will make those techniques irrelevant.

Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page, now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one else experience a degradation in the quality of results?

Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if I'm logged out of my Google account...

Yes, i noticed better results outside of personalized search... It is a hassle to logout thought. I actually use bing for 90% of searches... google is better at tech searches like mysql questions, but outside of that there results have gotten more irrelevant and crowded with useless content...

I hope they thought everything through, because there are a lot of cases where old content is just as good or even better - there are a lot of "timeless" articles and video out there.

However, when it comes to software/tech/anything fast moving, I'd really like to see the latest results first. I'm tired of searching for "how to set psa-proftpd to standalone in plesk" (just a quick example off the top of my head) and get 5 year old results that have long since stopped being relevant...

Since I never seem to miss a chance to criticize Google:

Thank you, Google. This should make your search results much more helpful.

The real question: does it matter who "breaks" a story first? Will the folks who got the story first get to the top of the "fresh" pile even though their story may be a day older? Or does the most recent content always win?

I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance:

If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics

I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far.

As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?

> I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous.

It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous, but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok. The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.

I constantly search for results within the past year to find information that's actually recent and current instead of "how to do x, circa 200X"

I do the same thing. I use the left-sidebar time range selection and set it to "past year" for about 50% of my searches.

So much that I wish it was visible by default, or even more central. So many times the top results are very high references of outdated things.

Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the early 1990s):

https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial

Glad this is here; I really liked Google realtime when it was around.

This is a much welcomed change. I find that I quite often want recency based searches and blogged a quick solution if you're using Chrome:

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recen...

They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...

Hopefully this will help out the perl crew and their problem with stale tutorials.

The leeds doc is still top result, but hopefully this will make it easier for them to push new stuff up there.

I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.

The real question is, do we have an alternative?

It's amusing how the megacorp Google uses the Occupy protests as the main example of their search changes.

color me unimpressed that they're now able to sort their livecrawl with a 'date' flag. And this seems to simply be a case of firing that filter automatically for 35% of their searches.

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