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Google is useless

December 15th, 2007 Leave a comment Go to comments

It seems an update for Google’s core, the search engine, is long overdue. Apart from tons of spam in it, Google also tries to be smarter than me, providing me with more useless search results. Ever tried searching for ubuntu islsm? islsm is a wireless driver. Apparently, Google doesn’t believe me I’m capable of writing my search terms correctly, so it silently corrects my search term to ubuntu islam. Yahoo is at least honest:

We have included ubuntu islam results - Show only ubuntu islsm

But, sadly, the best one in team is Live Search, which barely asks me, whether I’ve meant “ubuntu islam”.

That used to be Google’s default behaviour. It seems these glory times are over.

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  1. ben
    December 16th, 2007 at 20:01 | #1

    dead on. though it’s probably more of a downgrade that’s needed here. i tried searching for

    iswitch emacs debian

    recently and got a whole bunch of “how do i switch” or “-i switch” results… if i drop “debian” from the search terms it works fine though… apparently google is afraid of displaying only the “about 369” results i get with

    “iswitch” emacs debian

    and thus inserts a space in one of my search terms, coincidentally rendering the “about 2,090” results completely useless… nice going.

    btw. your religiously inspired example seems to be fixed now, or may the number of results just got large enough to warrant searching for the terms you actually entered in that particular case.

  2. ben
    December 16th, 2007 at 20:12 | #2

    sorry about the formating there, i didn’t realize wordpress eats carriage returns… bad wordpress

    oh, and msn now shows the same behavior as yahoo, making — for this short moment at least — google the best choice for this particular search… welcome to the ever-changing world of web services ;-)

  3. Mike Trump
    May 8th, 2009 at 11:41 | #3

    Exactly, Google has lost it’s relevance and it’s soul (if it ever had one). It is full of ads and sites looking to sell you something. It is useless as a search engine if you are looking for real information and not looking to buy things. Google, you fail seriously. 2 thumbs down at this end.

    Mike T.

  4. Idk
    June 2nd, 2009 at 02:14 | #4

    Mike I totally agree with you - I am utterly fed up with Google now. The worst are the results that just copies your search phrase and displays - you click on it and it has nothing useful for you - unfortunately this occurs a lot and comes up as the majority of the search results. boo to Google.

  5. aron
    March 17th, 2010 at 15:59 | #5

    google is almost completely useless, it does sometimes give you what you want, but not always, you could look up something and it will give you something completely off topic, it will give you all the result the have the same words in that sentence, but not the one you are looking for.

  6. XYZ
    April 8th, 2010 at 07:10 | #6

    Google search is useless for the student. Never gives the correct site name to elp them. It is rubbish and total time waste.

  7. May 19th, 2010 at 03:38 | #7

    just came across this new type of search engine, http://www.spotthings.com. They give you useful information, not just links

  8. HEVIHITR
    November 12th, 2010 at 01:47 | #8

    I so agree with the OP and others, I have used google for years, and in the past year or so I have found it, for the most part to be an exercise in futility, I often use the quote parameters, to search specific things, but google in its infinite wisdom [sarcasm intended] decides I don’t actually want to search those specific terms, by giving me results missing key words, or it finds pages that have the words, but not in the order I ask for them in, and not grouped, just randomly spaced throughout the page, it has gotten to the point where I often just give up, and go off to play some violent FPS, just so I don’t write threatening emails to google staff. I feel that google has moved from being a search provider to being a whore, basically selling itself to the highest bidder, and not giving a rats ass about why they started in the beginning, oh well fuck ‘em.

    HEVIHITR

  9. Manoj
    January 25th, 2011 at 18:52 | #9

    google is useless. Never gives the correct thing useless useless useless

  10. Estabon G
    March 24th, 2011 at 01:18 | #10

    Gmail is useless … waste of my time to attempt to use it ….

  11. May 8th, 2011 at 18:53 | #11

    completely agree, as you amy be able to tell from my website, I’m quite into roleplay, but it’s next to impossible to find anything useful within the first 5 pages of google anymore.

    It’s even worse if you’re trying to research something in particular! Case in point, I was trying to research Bel and the Dragon (from the bible) for something I’m writing for my site, first two pages of google are resturants! Not even a mention of the bible story. Seriously makes you wonder when they lost the plot…..

    The problem is, google have manuvered themselves into a monopoly, so in order to make money online people play exactly to googles algorythm, menaing the first 2 pages of any search are spam. If there were 3 big browsers, with around 30% market share each, then this wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad…

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