Wednesday, 3 August 2005
google dissatisfaction
Despite the title, I’m not dissatisfied with Google. Far from it. But I discovered a feature today that I’ve never seen before, and that I can’t find referenced anywhere—I don’t know if it’s brand-new, or if I just hadn’t discovered it yet.
I was looking for a student’s blog, and foolishly typed in the blog’s name (Jay is) without using quotes. Google unsurprisingly dropped the “is” from the search, and told me it had found 34 million results for “Jay.”
But after the first five results, I saw this (click to see full screen results):
Below it were the results for the (much better) phrase search, with Jay’s blog as the first link.
It’s been a long time since a search engine did something to improve my experience in such a direct way. Bravo, Google.
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Excerpt: Liz Lawley found a feature of Google that I can't reproduce, but she's got the screen capture to prove it. Maybe it's in beta, or maybe Google likes Liz more than it likes me. Anyway, for a search Liz did that had 34 million returns, after the fifth it...
Excerpt: Liz Lawley found a feature of Google that I can't reproduce, but she's got the screen capture to prove it. Maybe it's in beta, or maybe Google likes Liz more than it likes me. Anyway, for a search Liz did that had 34 million returns, after the fifth it...
Excerpt: A Google search today brought up an unexpected prompt. I am used to seeing the alternative spelling prompt...
Interesting, Very.
I have never seen that before. And... I do not see it now either - when I use that exact same search terms.
Wow this is a cool feature...I loooooove Google. I hadn't seen that pop up before, but once I searched for the same thing you did I saw it. Neato. (BTW there is a link at the bottom of the page after you search for something else that links to : http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=accra+ghana&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
That could be helpful, but if Google hadn't cut off after the first 5 results the page you were looking for would have been in the first page anyway (at #9). Maybe they're finding that people don't scroll down to see results at the bottom of the page?
Personally I find this sucks. The traditional "did you mean" system is much better. I ran into this with a search for "ika" and it gave me half a screen of results on "Ikea", which I didn't want to see.
Just as a small note, you can find Jay's site at jayisgames.com now.
For the first time in years I was using IE to browse... simply because I wanted to look at something which required quicktime, and my current browswer doesn't have qt enabled.
So I search google for something and this page comes up.
Clicking your google gif brings up a popup and gave me a damn virus.
I just tried clicking your link again and again my AntiVirus immediately redalerts me to virus.
NOT FUNNY. CLEAN UP YOUR NASTY VIRUS INFECTING WEBSITE.
C:\Documents and Settings\Straydog\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\58B8QEL6\xpl[1].wmf
May be infected by unknown virus Exploit.WMF
http://mamamusings.net/archives/dissatisfied1.gif
I have no idea how that happened. I'm taking a look right now.
Okay, it's fixed. I have *no* idea how that malicious javascript ended up in the .php file that contained the larger png file...and that's disturbing, to say the least.
However, legalteam, there was no need to get nasty about it here. Simply alerting me to the problem was all you needed to do.
Thank you Liz for investigating and correcting the problem.
I wasn't "having a go" at you particularly, so I apologise. Was just ensuring the point was made loudly as no one likes to deal with any issue with causes an alert.
Incidently my dissatisfaction with Google comes from the fact that very recently they have disabled one of their web engine services I used freqently.
Sometimes we all get links from forums and places which are not hyperlinked and want to follow them up.
So I always used google to paste in the URL, and even if Google had no info on the link it would always offer me the opportunity to test the address link to see if it valid.
Now Google have removed that service leaving little option but to paste any URL you want to check directly to address bar, which subsequently gets clogged up with all the URLs you check, until you clear all cache stuff.
So I came to your blog trying to find the Google dissatisfaction link so I could ask them to reactivate their useful service.
And this is the link to the Google "Dissatisfied" form which I was searching for:
(It is surprisingly difficult to find)
http://www.google.co.uk/quality_form
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