Google Can’t Get You Lucky Anymore: It is Search Result Impotent | Hacker News Reader

Google Can’t Get You Lucky Anymore: It is Search Result Impotent

blog.thatwayhat.com

4 pointsgmyachtsman26 comments

I tried "sun hats" and got the ad from coolibar and only one other result out of ten on the first page. So, I ask for some more facts, not just anecdotal evidence of failure. Do you visit coolibar regularly? were you logged in or incognito? I tried both and got similar results. How many searches did you perform to come up with these anomalies? Have you seen this behavior before or perhaps it was just a bug?

UPDATE: It appears we have been spammed. To answer my own question, I think he has been on coolibar. This person is launching a site that is a directory for hats (first link above blog post). His lack of any response says it all. Clever ploy ...

I posted the pdf's of the results (linked to the search terms). I see google giving me results like this a lot. I signed out of google, cleared my browser cache and history, and still the same results. I never joined google plus.

Not spammed at all -- this is what I am dealing with and thought it was google.

Hey Seth, I found how you can get the same result: set your search to return 100 results per page and you will see google send the same domains over and over in a row.

This may be the result of some weird personalization specific to the author, which I suppose may be interesting itself. I do not see similar results at all (one result from coolibar for sun hats and 1 result from amazon for womens sun hats).

I am getting this kind of result all the time from google. Interesting you are not.

I am getting similar results as travisp ... definitely not 34 in a row from Alibaba. Definitely some personalization from Google going on here.

Here is the url from google search. I should have given it originally: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=sun+ha...

Here's what I get for your comparison: https://img.skitch.com/20120814-j2xu3wswpure3aji84ah63566g.j...

13rules, are you getting 10 results on a page or 100? I can't see if there are more than 10 or see the url. The problem is only happening when displaying more than 10 search results on a page.

Oh weird ... I see what you are talking about now. The num=100 does nothing to change the number of search results apparently, you have to change it in the settings.

With it at 100 results the first 19 are for coolibar.com and the next 8 for amazon.com

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce these results. I'm not saying they are false, but that maybe they have to do with personalized results for the author. Did you try logging out and doing the same searches? There was a maximum of results from the same page that could be shown (I think it was about five), so I'm not sure how you can get this results.

Also, there's another issue. Even if you get the same webpages all the time, that doesn't mean that those aren't the same results. Especially when webpages today have a lot of different content. I.e. diversity != quality.

From what everyone here is saying, it is clear to me I am being put in some kind of fish bowl with the results I am getting while other people are not in my same fish bowl. I can't explain it, since (as I mentioned above) I cleared my history and cache, signed out, restart browser and still the same outcome. Personally I care a lot about the results both for my business purposes and my personal searching, so this upsets me a lot.

Yes, they are different pages on each of the .com sites, but still, it is really repetitive. I would if others like you are getting duplicative results on other topics. (Though for me it seems to be all around -- even Sunday News which I would never be actually putting into the google search engine). This duplication problem is not appearing for me in yahoo to anywhere the same extent.

Weird I have pretty different results to your search. Odd outlier outcome of Google personalization or perhaps even malware?

hmmm, I had not thought of malware.

This might be a long shot, but consider doing an online antivirus scan such as housecall.trendmicro.com and see what's up.

In my younger days of downloading things from the Internet, I've downloaded malware that hijacks your search results to be spamtacular -- for fun and profit on their end of course.

Hey binary, if you still care -- I realized that these google search results of link after link from the same domain, happens only when you have the search setting to return more than 10 results per page (worst problem at 100 results/page). Change your settings to 100 and you will see the same.

I solved this problem -- I had my search preferences set to return 100 results. If I change it to return 10 results, I no longer get duplication of results. Seems like google really wants to push users to refresh their ads.

gmyachtsman, if you are searching specifically for products, try using Google's shopping search : http://www.google.com/shopping

Thanks, I do know google shopping and even list my products there. I wonder if other people are having the same problems for things that they search for frequently -- whatever that is.

What do you think, am I right about this?

It doesn't honestly look like it. I've not been able to get the same results as you either. Mine look varied and useful.

Although I will say that now with Instant search, the "I'm feeling lucky" button is both redundant and impossible to use. As soon as I start typing, I get a results display and the IFL button has disappeared. (To be fair, there's no point really)

Here's what I see (with personalisation). Without is roughly the same, only the two ads top right are missing and replaced with something that looks more generic.

http://i.imgur.com/xwoOP.png

davewasthere, hmmm, folding sun hat is not exactly my search term. Seems you are in the UK, I am in NYC, but this is what I am getting: http://blog.thatwayhat.com/blogfiles/folding-sun-hat-Google-...

I would not have searched exactly for this before, but I am getting 4 in a row from ifactoryoutlet.com 3 in a row from dharmatrading.com 11 in a row from alibaba.com etc

Hey Dave, if you are still interested -- I figured out what is causing my funky search results. If you set your google search to return 100 results on a page, you will see the same: multiple results in a row from a few domains. (I edited my original post too, so that people can see how to duplicate the problem).

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