Yes, you can. But Google wants to make search better. There's no denying it's gotten worse as time goes on (and SEO gets better). The only thing to do next is to understand what you're looking for by understanding you.
"I don't want relevant search results, I just want relevant search results!" This is the problem Google faces. They've made their choice.
For many people this is great and exactly what they want. Sometimes it's what I want; sometimes Google's stemming or synonyms gets me a result that I would have struggled to find.
But, sometimes, I want Google to search for the words I enter. I want Google to return the same results to me as it does to Bob and Ann (if they're both in my country).
I don't care that [roses] gives me a different result to [roses roses roses]; I do care that Ann gets a different result for [roses] than Bob does. I can't explain why I care, and I'm happy to accept that I'm wrong. (For example, hopefully once people pick up that Google serves different results they'll stop saying Just Google It, which is good advice but sucks if you've Googled it and found only three forum posts with people being told to just Google it.)
I guess a lot of this is age and weariness. I remember a time when a Google search result would be an opportunity for serendipity to point me towards great sources of information. Some person, an expert, had a little plain html page with a few diagrams and a lot of text and I'd have to work to understand it. Now? Not so much. I get a lot of content farms (But I'm really grateful to Google for tweaking those down, and allowing me to block content from certain domains) or flash heavy brand sites (See especially photographers and watch manufacturers.) or a narrow band of not fun sites.
How do you know this will happen? They haven't turned their new algorithm on yet. You're claiming an idea hasn't worked in the past, but the idea has never been tried before.
The reason they're changing their search results is because their search results are starting to suck more. They're trying to fix your complaint. Want the same shitty search full of SEO spam? Sign out. Otherwise you're just bitching.
>(But I'm really grateful to Google for tweaking those down, and allowing me to block content from certain domains)
THIS IS WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO DO. If you don't like content farms chances are no one else does either. And yet you complain.
I do plenty of international travel and, until I figured out how to control the country-level Google I got, I violently hated this.
It sounds to me like you want Google to implement exactly the level of personalization you want, no more and no less. I don't think that's reasonable. What I do think is reasonable asking Google to give you the tools required to control the level of personalization you get. For the most part, I think they do that (though I'm sure there are more than a few rough edges at this point).
For example if I search for "python books" I get results about books teaching the programming language. I'm a programmer and this makes sense in that it is both 'relevant' and 'accurate'.
If my girlfriend does the same search she gets books about snakes. She is a biologist so it is again both 'accurate' and 'relevant'.
The problem arrises if she gets results about programming because she does not know or care about it. It is technically 'accurate' but now the product is useless to her.
Look at the Wikipedia article for "python". There are too many uses for the word.
I don't want that. I don't mind having to work a bit harder to get results, so long as those results are excellent. So, for your example, I want to have to type an extra word (either programming or snakes or herpatology or whatever) to provide the context that Google would otherwise get from wherever. I understand that most people don't want what I want, which I why I try and avoid the many Google-bashing posts. (I'm not part of that crowd; I don't think Google is evil. Just less useful for me in lots of situations.)
I prefer consistency and repeatability over slowly changing weirdness.
I'm all anti-Google, but this makes no sense to me.
You want to type an extra word?
"I don't want to be tracked and sold to advertisers", or "I don't want to be second-guessed" makes much more sense.
I type slowly, about 60 words a minute. That extra word is an extra second of typing, but it makes the results a lot more useful to me.
There's other advantages. (Maybe these aren't as obvious or real to other people.) Thinking about the words I use forces me to think about the problem, and forces me to think around what I'm doing and why.
It also increases the effect of grouping people into only social groups of the same philosophy and reducing exposure to other points of view. Not good for society. So even if I could fix it for myself, it is bad in general.
I'm often looking up stuff related to code - I would love Google to know what languages I use, and present me with results specific to them. If I'm looking up something different, I'm sure Google will present me with their best guess of what I might mean...
I see your point in the post above but disagree. People should control their search results based on what they are searching for, relevance is objective to ones personality, not subject to it.
What I am trying to illustrate is that the alleged relevance of a set of results biased on the basis of an individual's profile is incredibly insular (and harmful) if it's there at all.
Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'
...anything else, in my opinion, skates dangerously close to what most people railed against in the great Net Neutrality debate of 09.
> Boiling it down even further: I believe that search results should reflect what is on the Internet, not just that portion of it that Google deems 'relevant.'
And what I'm trying to illustrate is that you're taking an overly simplistic approach to the question. Google takes in a lot of signals (links, country and language, past behavior with respect to previous queries, sites you've asked to be blocked, ...) and now social signals. Where do you draw the line and why? And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?
I'd agree with that. In fact, I'd say that's a lot to do with my point... I believe that search results should be literal. A search for 'python', in my opinion, ought to return links to information about the animal, the language, the character from The Jungle Book, etc.
>And why isn't a user responding with more detailed guidance ("I didn't mean X [even though I often do], I mean Y right now") a reasonable exceptional flow some of the time?
This is interesting. I guess what I'd like to see is something along these lines. Turning it over in my head earlier: the thought of making two distinct types of searches did cross my mind, ie: searching from your G+ homepage returns focused results from the web at large with social results intermingling whereas searching from www.google.com returns literal results with no fiddling. The user is enabled to select which one is used by default from the search bar in their browser.
Links in Hebrew (I'm in Israel) are unreadable and not helping.
I constantly end up with German results polluting my search (maybe because I signed up when I lived in Germany? No idea, it's out of my control). It is a hassle to fight them.
It got never better. I gradually noticed a trend of decreasing usefulness of Google search, without any visible sign of getting better. Only more dumbed down. And now 'social'?
You have provided no metric for that statement, so how could it even be measured?
There is too much on the internet for you to read it all. Finding what you want at some particular time is going to require a curator, and they are going to be biased.
(besides, the overfitting you describe isn't exactly the hardest problem to figure out and fix (just mix in some other python results and that related results thing that's already there). The hard part is quickly identifying that you actually are affecting users negatively and not just the guy that thinks everyone should have to look at nextag results)
>You have provided no metric for that statement, so how could it even be measured?
That's fair. My comment is massively vague.
Maybe I could reframe that comment as a question: are you of the opinion that moving results that herd users into Google's own products and content above results that are perhaps less biased, more objective and do not serve to enrich Google directly is better for users than the way that Google search has worked up until this point?
I know that the subject of search is hugely complex and that Googles algorithms already define what is returned to the user but I am questioning what I perceive to be a change in motivation and a change in quality as result.
But you are correct in that these disambiguations are necessary to a certain extent. I think most users wouldn't react well to it being so prominent (as is with DDG). Perhaps a small sidebar would do well for this, but that would eat into their advertising real-estate.
She's a keeper!
I think we are agreed that one way or another - the coming changes are not 100% great for users across the board.
Good for Google perhaps (and that is important) but not good for all users.
Looking at the other responses to my comments and other comments on the thread in general the realisation is dawning that maybe my days of searching the web via Google are soon to be over. That is not a comment on the quality of their service or integrity or anything along those lines, it is an assessment of my position relative to their new direction.
Sometimes it's difficult for us in the technology community to get that most products aren't made for us.
SPYW is where you type in "python books" and the top half of the screen consists of your programmer friends talking about Python.
Or when your girlfriend types in "python books" and the top of the screen consists of her biologist friends talking about snakes.
That's what I'm seeing with my search results. I have no qualms with Google trying to "understand" me and offer more relevant links.
Without an algorithm, you'll get a list of every reference to the searched terms, unsorted in any useful way. The only way to provide accurate results is to know what you're looking for. So either users need to be very specific, or search engines need to get smarter.