Ogooglebar

Scott Hardie | April 1, 2013
I'm amused that Google has sued to keep the Swedish word for "ungoogleable" out of the dictionary.

Does anyone else have more and more trouble with search engines lately? It seems like Google can't understand the combination of my search terms, so it just serves up a popular page matching one or two of them. For instance, I'll run into a problem with some software I'm coding for, so I'll search for "how do I customize [X feature] of [Y program] in [Z situation]?" and Google will serve up an introductory tutorial on Y program, which has no information about X or Z.

I thought it was just a problem with the particular software that I'm working with, but increasingly, I find this problem elsewhere. Just now I was trying to remember the name of a retired packaged meal that I used to like, to see if I could find a recipe to make it online. Searches for various permutations of "canceled Stouffers entrees" turned up stouffers.com as the first result (which does not include the word "canceled," let alone what I mean), and then just coupons. When I try Bing, it's all coupons. Maybe the information that I'm looking for doesn't exist online, but it would be nice of the search engines to say "no results found, here's our best guess," or some other indicator that the algorithm lacks confidence. (I like to run Bing It On in situations like this just to see if one of them finds what I want, but it's usually two different varieties of results, both totally useless.)

What I really want is for search engines to parse the linguistic structure of what I type. English isn't that hard to program for, is it? In the aforementioned example, what I want is information about how Z situation affects X feature, and I'm really just mentioning Y program to provide context. A human being who knew the answer could instantly understand the question that I asked and give me the information. Search engines apparently can't, or they won't admit that the information doesn't exist online, so they pass off lame non-matches instead.

I guess what I'm really wondering is: Has anybody else noticed Google getting dumber? Google first came along in an age when search engines gave you too many results and you had to sift through page after page in pursuit of what you really wanted. Google changed everything by introducing relevance, so that the information that you really wanted was the first result, nearly every time. They built an empire on this. And now it seems, at least to me, like this ability is beyond them. What happened?

Samir Mehta | April 2, 2013
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | April 2, 2013
That's certainly likely. I know Google was forced to make big changes to adapt to so many websites gaming the system. But that doesn't explain all of my trouble: The software that I've been researching is open-source, and the community website that hosts their documentation and forums is donation-supported (not to mention dry and technical), so I doubt they're doing aggressive SEO work. Maybe we're witnessing the early phases of the end of Google's search empire, as too many people become too good at exploiting their algorithm, and too much of the web becomes impossible to index well.