<story><title>Yahoo tops Google in US traffic</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57599600-93/wait-what-yahoo-tops-google-in-us-traffic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thisisnotatest</author><text>Google engineer here.&lt;p&gt;We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google &amp;quot;ignoring the word you asked for,&amp;quot; there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn&amp;#x27;t have the exact words you asked for, and you didn&amp;#x27;t even notice. We&amp;#x27;re not perfect but we&amp;#x27;re always working on improvements.&lt;p&gt;We also added &amp;quot;Verbatim Mode&amp;quot; to save you the trouble of putting &amp;quot;each&amp;quot; &amp;quot;query&amp;quot; &amp;quot;term&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;quotes&amp;quot; when you want to exactly match all your query words.</text></item><item><author>pasbesoin</author><text>I &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap.  They are mostly best for &amp;quot;big name&amp;quot; items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.&lt;p&gt;These days, I&amp;#x27;m fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.&lt;p&gt;Whatever you are and aren&amp;#x27;t doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that&amp;#x27;s not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again.  Pages and pages full of very spammy results.&lt;p&gt;Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information.  These days... the spam results just go on and one.  If there&amp;#x27;s quality somewhere in the search results, it&amp;#x27;s beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.&lt;p&gt;Not that I&amp;#x27;m using Yahoo, in preference.  That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads.  Probably not the right explanation, but...&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;P.S.  Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me.  Being able to tell the query engine that I &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t want to see results that don&amp;#x27;t include term x frequently proved quite useful.  Now... the damned thing shows me &amp;quot;whatever it feels like&amp;quot;, whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jimrandomh</author><text>No. Your metrics are deceiving you, because your test suite under-weights or fails to include sophisticated searchers and programmers, and fails to include highly-specific queries with only a few results. For technical people, Google search has gotten so much worse it&amp;#x27;s hard to ignore.&lt;p&gt;Google fails for more than half of programming-related queries, because it splits up multi-word identifiers, and spelling-corrects valid technical terms to unrelated English words. It fails when searching for uncommon error messages in quotes.&lt;p&gt;This might be tolerable if turning on Verbatim mode was easy, but to do it (without a browser plugin) you have to first do a failed search, then click three times, the second of which is hard to aim because the target is animated by the first click.&lt;p&gt;Google Search fails whenever I&amp;#x27;m doing a search where I suspect there are few or no results and want to confirm that. Then there are the queries with one or two matches on StackOverflow or a mailing list that fails to answer the question. You can&amp;#x27;t just move on, because there are pages and pages of scraper sites cluttering up the results with the exact same message. Improving the ranking doesn&amp;#x27;t help, because the problem isn&amp;#x27;t the rankings, it&amp;#x27;s that you don&amp;#x27;t know when you&amp;#x27;re done.&lt;p&gt;Then there&amp;#x27;s personalization, and in particular the inter-query persistence. You do this because some people make two queries, and include keywords that accurately indicate what they want in the first query, then omit them from the second query. In my own usage, however, if I do a second query it&amp;#x27;s often because the first query had something in it that I &lt;i&gt;didn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; want, which spoiled the results. Since I always include the keywords that were actually helpful, I get none of the upside. And if my second search then gives bad results, personalization means I can&amp;#x27;t trust that the reason is part of the query I made.&lt;p&gt;Basically, you&amp;#x27;ve improved your metrics at the expense of everything on those metrics&amp;#x27; blind spots. There are a lot of people whining, most of them unable to articulate what&amp;#x27;s wrong, but &lt;i&gt;they are right&lt;/i&gt;. Now please, go enter these complaints into your bug tracker and fix it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Yahoo tops Google in US traffic</title><url>http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57599600-93/wait-what-yahoo-tops-google-in-us-traffic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thisisnotatest</author><text>Google engineer here.&lt;p&gt;We run experiments that show ranking improvements before launching changes to how we interpret query words. I would guess that for every time you notice Google &amp;quot;ignoring the word you asked for,&amp;quot; there were several times where we got you the right result even though it didn&amp;#x27;t have the exact words you asked for, and you didn&amp;#x27;t even notice. We&amp;#x27;re not perfect but we&amp;#x27;re always working on improvements.&lt;p&gt;We also added &amp;quot;Verbatim Mode&amp;quot; to save you the trouble of putting &amp;quot;each&amp;quot; &amp;quot;query&amp;quot; &amp;quot;term&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;quotes&amp;quot; when you want to exactly match all your query words.</text></item><item><author>pasbesoin</author><text>I &amp;quot;Google&amp;quot; less and less for search results, as they become increasingly crap.  They are mostly best for &amp;quot;big name&amp;quot; items; also, the prominence of StackOverflow means that some computer technology queries still work pretty well.&lt;p&gt;These days, I&amp;#x27;m fortunate when I know specifically enough what I want that I can jump straight into Wikipedia and hopefully find an adequate page.&lt;p&gt;Whatever you are and aren&amp;#x27;t doing about it, Google, whenever I search for something detailed that&amp;#x27;s not in StackOverflow, your results are increasingly crap, once again.  Pages and pages full of very spammy results.&lt;p&gt;Some time ago -- perhaps a few years ago or a bit more -- I became accustomed to fairly quickly paging several pages into the search results, where the heaviest, highly ranked spam would start to filter out and I could start to recognize more legitimate sources of information.  These days... the spam results just go on and one.  If there&amp;#x27;s quality somewhere in the search results, it&amp;#x27;s beyond the limit of my patience to continue paging forward and scanning.&lt;p&gt;Not that I&amp;#x27;m using Yahoo, in preference.  That part... all I can think of is measuring by byte counts, and buttloads of banner ads.  Probably not the right explanation, but...&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;P.S.  Your (Google, again) elimination of the + operator in your search queries was, again anecdotally, another factor in the declining performance of your searches for me.  Being able to tell the query engine that I &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; don&amp;#x27;t want to see results that don&amp;#x27;t include term x frequently proved quite useful.  Now... the damned thing shows me &amp;quot;whatever it feels like&amp;quot;, whether I quote terms, beg,.... any other suggestions?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>batgaijin</author><text>Do you guys dogfood your programming search questions or do you have an internal thing for that? Because honestly when I google technical stuff and get corrected despite using &amp;quot;&amp;quot; (since now &amp;#x27;+&amp;#x27; is deprecated) it makes me super rage. The only thing that escapes it is the super.crazy.java.conventions that are obvious.</text></comment>