Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html

by topcat31 • 15 years ago

86 65 15 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

The real question: does it matter who "breaks" a story first? Will the folks who got the story first get to the top of the "fresh" pile even though their story may be a day older? Or does the most recent content always win?

guimarin• 15 years ago

color me unimpressed that they're now able to sort their livecrawl with a 'date' flag. And this seems to simply be a case of firing that filter automatically for 35% of their searches.

s00pcan• 15 years ago

I constantly search for results within the past year to find information that's actually recent and current instead of "how to do x, circa 200X"

epoxyhockey3• 15 years ago

I do the same thing. I use the left-sidebar time range selection and set it to "past year" for about 50% of my searches.

agumonkey• 15 years ago

So much that I wish it was visible by default, or even more central. So many times the top results are very high references of outdated things.

natesm2• 15 years ago

Has anyone else noticed Google making a lot of autocorrection mistakes recently? I don't mind the traditional "did you mean" links, but I've been getting redirected to pages for different queries, with a "did you mean [what you actually typed]" link.

It's especially a problem with programming because a lot of words that are "wrong" are actually acronyms or strange library names.

dangrossman• 15 years ago

Yes, all the time. I pretty much never expect Google to search for what I asked the first time around now.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

Yes. It is incredibly frustrating.

There's a fine line between being helpful and taking control from the user. Google used to be safely on the helpful side of the line. Now more and more SERPs are wasting my time by making me refine my search with qualifiers to ensure I actually get what I want.

blhack2• 15 years ago

I think that google is losing sight of what made them popular to begin with.

[within reason] Every workshop on the planet has a hammer in it. This is because hammers are very simple, they never break, they never behave unexpectedly, they're highly useful, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do as perfectly as anybody can imagine. Hammers are the perfect tools; something that should have been idolized in Brave New World.

Google was a hammer for a long time. It wasn't even a question that google would be the default search engine for everybody who knew anything about anything. Google did search really well, behaved exactly as advertised, rarely broke.

It was perfect. It was a hammer.

It feels like google (overall, I don't just mean search) is losing their grasp on this.

Stuff like charts API. Maybe it's just me, but the new version of this is annoying. It's some javascripty nonsense that feels complicated. It's a laser-guided, nuclear-powered gryoscopically stabilized, diamond-tipped screwdriver that can also make coffee and fold your laundry. You could build a submarine with it.

But it's also got an instruction manual that is a foot thick.

The old api was just: <img src='https://charts.google.com/?cht=pie&chd=foo,bar,etc>;

or something similar.

And now I can't +term, they took away the links to "cached" versions of the pages, things autocomplete (incorrectly), it assumes I meant something that I didn't, it wants to integrate into a social network, etc. etc.

Google...you're starting to feel a little microsofty. Are you okay?

nyellin2• 15 years ago

I wish Google catered more to geeks.

I understand how Google indexes the web. Let me control my own queries. Give us geeks the ability to enable/disable freshness, even if it means appending &fresh=0 to the URL

abraham• 15 years ago

You can still use Image Charts: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/image/

The cached links are still there. They just got moved to the preview page. I assume not enough people used them for the amount of clutter they created in the SERPs.

Florin_Andrei• 15 years ago

The A players are getting old or bored, the B players are trickling in.

Or the PHBs are taking over.

gbog• 15 years ago

It is a bit like small dogs shouting at the caravan, but if I had to express a concern about Google, it would be more about their new design, the replacement of default scrollbar, the autoloading of next images, etc.

moultano3• 15 years ago

If you can remember any examples I will make sure they get looked at.

blhack2• 15 years ago

Is there a link to "tell google that this autocorrect was wrong" somewhere under the search box?

Because that might be helpful.

natesm2• 15 years ago

Ah, this is one of those situations where you'd love to remember an example or more, but everything you try actually works - then sometime a few days later it happens!

iron_ball• 15 years ago

Google recently corrected "ruby dreampie" (I wanted a Ruby equivalent of the excellent Python REPL) to "ruby creampie", with extremely NSFW results. It should avoid correcting a search term if the corrected version is potentially offensive.

pluies• 15 years ago

I was searching if the true? function existed in Scheme yesterday, which ended up very frustratingly:

  true? scheme

Redirects to a search for "true scheme".

  +true? scheme

Gives exactly the same results, but tells me that the '+' operator has been deprecated and that I should use quotes. Okay.

  "true?" scheme

Give the same results, i.e. a search for "true scheme".

  +"true?" scheme

Just for good measure, but gives the exact same results too.

evmar2• 15 years ago

You don't have a million yourself? The spell check fires 5 times a day for me and 4 of them are wrong.

unfasten2• 15 years ago

I came across this one yesterday when I was looking for more information about something mentioned on HN:

    Search:  carmack +zfail gpl
      Date:  2011-11-02
    Result:  Bad autocorrect; Plus operator broke
    """
    Showing results for carmack fail gpl
    Search instead for carmack zfail gpl
    """

Because the plus operator is broken my final search ended up being `carmack "z-fail" OR "zfail" gpl` because different sources included or excluded the dash. Note that I think it's good that quotes are still exact and they shouldn't do the synonym search, but this is something the plus operator would have worked on, if I remember correctly.

fred_nada2• 15 years ago

moultano: notice this "fresh" search https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+courier

every page in the top 10 organic results were coming from pages that were either added or updated within 2011 except for the youtube results. those 2 videos were added in 2009.

i also noticed that your youtube videoes were higher in the results than articles from gizmodo, arstechnica, engadget, Time magazine and whole slew of other articles that were released 2 days ago.

just asking...

epoxyhockey3• 15 years ago

Here's one I just came across.. The search term: where to buy ties in boston

The 4th & 5th results are about car "tires"

recoiledsnake• 15 years ago

A recent example, searching for eb_row returns results for 'eyebrow' And the worst thing? The search page is without even the "Did you mean" links!

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=e...

I can't imagine Google devs are happy with this. Cmon Google, let us geeks in on the internal search that your devs use. Host it at geek.google.com or whatever. Probably won't happen since geeks don't click on ads much, and Google is cutting down on dev friendly side projects like code.google.com these days.

jakeonthemove7• 15 years ago

Yeah, not even the quotes help in some cases, and I expect Google to show me results that contain the exact word I'm searching for, no matter if it thinks I misspelled it (it's like the algorithm says "let me correct that for you, stupid" :-)...

teflonhook• 15 years ago

They probably make more money from ads by autocorrecting.

untog• 15 years ago

I'm actually a little conflicted about this. For instance:

If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics

I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous. In any case, when you search for "olympics" it returns results about the Olympics as an institution, not any particular year. As it should be. In fact, the first specific year mentioned is 2016. Maybe Google turned the dial a little too far.

As for the "occupy oakland" and "nbc lockout" searches... isn't that's what News search is for?

jsnell2• 15 years ago

> I'm guessing that Google has the data to back that up, but it seems presumptuous.

It's interesting that you find the idea of a freshness signal presumptuous, but the hundreds or thousands of existing signals seem to be completely ok. The whole point of search is to try to guess from hilariously little signal (a couple of words) exactly which parts of a huge corpus (tens of billions of pages) you want to see. Making arbitrary decisions on what you meant is the main functionality of the site, not some annoying extra feature.

jellicle• 15 years ago

This should be good. Many queries get clogged up with the long tail of pages from 2003 that are often useless to answer the question at hand.

I hope Google will let us turn it off easily ("-fresh" keyword? advanced search?) if we truly want older pages.

I also hope this won't lead to content farms auto-republishing their pages every six hours with the latest timestamp included to look "fresh". Or rather, I know it will lead to that, and I hope Google is prepared for it.

_wp3r• 15 years ago

I also hope that the effect that "freshness" has on the total ranking of a result is not high. There are huge swaths of the internet and subjects in which "freshness" would not improve quality.

Changes of this blanket nature are a result of some form of the "Valley Effect" or new is always better. IMO.

The example used, the Olympics, is an outlyer comparison in which this specific change is overly relevant.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

What I dislike the most from recent updates is the preview feature. I find it completely gets in my way, and it's very easy to unintentionally make it preview something, when I just want to scan the results. Does anyone else find that feature useful?

epoxyhockey3• 15 years ago

I never understood the usefulness of the preview feature. The only time I find it marginally interesting is when a website is currently down or had recently been taken offline. Though, I find the "cache:" query more useful in those cases anyway.

The preview window does pop-up unexpectedly for me as well. I guess my mouse pointer wanders over to the right side of the search result every once in a while, triggering the preview.

brc2• 15 years ago

I think the preview thumbnail is a very poor substitute for the 'cached' links that have disappeared. Sometimes the cache link was the best thing for an underperforming website or one that was down. It was simple, everyone understood it, now it's gone. Boo.

wahnfrieden• 15 years ago

I don't at all, and find it incredibly distracting to have movement on the entire right half o the page when I'm just trying to scan the search result text.

0xABADC0DA• 15 years ago

The preview panel is useful because Bing has it. It's like Google has set out to ape anything Bing does so the only difference is the result quality.

- Bing added a main search page background image, so Google adds one (but only if you're logged in).

- Bing changed the image search to pack images together with hover for info, so Google made theirs do the same.

- Bing added image search parameters like size, style, etc, so Google adds them too.

- Bing added preview panel, so Google added it too.

- Bing moved cache links into the preview, so Google moves cache links into the preview.

...iirc Bing did all these things and more first before Google.

jakeonthemove7• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's just... stupid. It would've actually been more useful if it was smaller (like Windows 7 taskbar previews), not take a whole third of the page. Thankfully, it's not automatically showing up anymore (at least for me), so it's cool...

unfasten2• 15 years ago

The following CSS should disable preview and put the Cached and Similar links back into the correct spot. I use UserCSS in Opera, not sure what to use in other browsers but I know there are solutions for custom CSS available:

    .vspib { display: none !important; } /* This is the preview specific line */

    .vshid {
        display: inline !IMPORTANT;
        padding-left: .7em !important;
    }
    .vshid > a {
        color: #1122cc !important;
        text-decoration: none !important;
    }
    .vshid > a:hover { text-decoration: underline !important; }
    .vshid > a:visited { color: #6611cc; }

This next bit of CSS should puts the URL back below the snippet text. It works for most result types but there are a few where it's buggy, for example any results that show how many people "+1'd" a URL:

    li.g .s,
    li.g.videobox .s > table.ts > tbody > tr > td > div
        { padding-bottom: 1.4em !important; }  /* Make room for the moved URL */
    li.g.videobox .s { padding-bottom: .5em !important; }
    li.g.videobox .s > table td > div { position: relative !important; }
    li.g .s > .f.kv, li.g.videobox .s > table .kvm {
        position: absolute !important;
        bottom: 0 !important;
    }

I have Instant disabled so the above CSS may or may not play well with Instant enabled.

danilocampos2• 15 years ago

I hope this works. Searches for error messages and the like are often cluttered with results from 2009 or earlier, describing troubleshooting steps that are out of date or unnecessary. At this point I add the current year to the end of any given troubleshooting search – and even that isn't always enough.

jontas• 15 years ago

I run into this problem all the time. I usually hit the "More search tools" link and then limit my search to the past year or so (depending on the issue).

Also including specific version numbers helps as well.. but maybe this update will make those techniques irrelevant.

pavel• 15 years ago

Lately I've noticed that search results are much worse than they used to be. I used to be able to find the things I've been looking for on the first page, now it seems like most of the links are not very relevant to my query. Any one else experience a degradation in the quality of results?

jakeonthemove7• 15 years ago

Yes, they are worse. A lot of times, Bing actually shows something more relevant, so it can't be all the spammers. Maybe it has something to do with the search history Google keeps, because sometimes I get different results if I'm logged out of my Google account...

fred_nada2• 15 years ago

Yes, i noticed better results outside of personalized search... It is a hassle to logout thought. I actually use bing for 90% of searches... google is better at tech searches like mysql questions, but outside of that there results have gotten more irrelevant and crowded with useless content...

simon_weber• 15 years ago

Glad this is here; I really liked Google realtime when it was around.

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

Since I never seem to miss a chance to criticize Google:

Thank you, Google. This should make your search results much more helpful.

sant0sk1• 15 years ago

This is a much welcomed change. I find that I quite often want recency based searches and blogged a quick solution if you're using Chrome:

http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2011/08/a-better-way-to-get-recen...

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

Hopefully this will help out the perl crew and their problem with stale tutorials.

The leeds doc is still top result, but hopefully this will make it easier for them to push new stuff up there.

jakeonthemove7• 15 years ago

I hope they thought everything through, because there are a lot of cases where old content is just as good or even better - there are a lot of "timeless" articles and video out there.

However, when it comes to software/tech/anything fast moving, I'd really like to see the latest results first. I'm tired of searching for "how to set psa-proftpd to standalone in plesk" (just a quick example off the top of my head) and get 5 year old results that have long since stopped being relevant...

cbr• 15 years ago

Unfortunately this doesn't fix the perl tutorial issue (top result is from the early 1990s):

https://www.google.com/search?q=perl+tutorial

jakeonthemove7• 15 years ago

They were also experimenting with automatic scrolling in Image Search - that left me dumbfounded when I was trying to click on an image and it was scrolling down instead :-). It seems to be gone now, though...

3pt14159• 15 years ago

I really hope programming languages are one of the ones covered. The number of Ruby articles that are out of date even 1 year old is stunning.

suivix• 15 years ago

It's amusing how the megacorp Google uses the Occupy protests as the main example of their search changes.

kkihara• 15 years ago

The real question is, do we have an alternative?

Google's new "freshness" update. Affects ~35% of searches

Related Stories