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Google is useless

December 15th, 2007

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.

  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 ;-)

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