Tag: Google

Idiots at Google News

Google’s been receiving a lot of criticism lately as it grows bigger and bigger, and for the most part I think a lot of that criticism has been misplaced. One area where Google has clearly screwed up, however, is Google News. Google uses an inexplicable process to determine which sites do and do not get included as news sites, and has ended up including racist sites from time to time.

But today while doing some research I noticed that Google is including as a news site, Postcards from the Pug Bus. Huh? That site is explicit on its front page that it is a satire site. The tagline for the site reads,

The satire site that obscures the line between the real and the surreal

What moron at Google News looked at this site and thought, “hey, it’s a satire site — lets added it to the sites indexed by Google News!” How long until they add The Onion to the list of Google News sites?

JustFuckingGoogleIt.com

Related to my earlier post about search engines, generally, and Google, specifically, there is of course the wonderfully titled Just Fucking Google It, complete with Bart Simpson offering advice.

Which would be made easier, of course, if people have the tools and skills to intelligently search Google. But many of them do not, and the optimal way to search Google is nonobvious.

Somebody’s Web Site Just Isn’t There, But I Think It’s Dave’s

Dave Winer again excoriates Google,

Lucovsky’s blog has gone 404. Editorial: Lucovsky shouldn’t have trashed his former employer in a Google-owned space. But you don’t pull the site because of that. You learn, grow, show your mistakes, do it better next time. Mark L’s former employer gets it, Google does not. The company that owns Blogger has not one clue what blogging is about.

But I can reach Lucovsky’s site just fine, including the post Winer linked to yesterday.

Winer gets a 404 from the notoriosly unreliable Blogspot site and its suddenly a huge conspiracy. Well, somebody doesn’t have a clue.

(The real question here is when is Google actually going to do something about Blogspot’s horrible performance problems, which frequently rear their ugly head when you try to access archived entries).

ROTFLMAO at Google Toolbar Attacks

You just have to appreciate the sort of bombast that Dave Winer can generate. Google creates a beta version of its toolbar that automatically detects addresses and turns them into links to Google Maps automatically — if the user explicitly chooses this behavior — and it turns out to be the end of the Web as we know it.

Any news organization or academic journal that publishes on the Web now has a serious integrity issue because of the existence of the Google toolbar with the AutoLink feature. All documents will have to contain a disclaimer that links contained within the page may not have been placed there by the author or organization whose copyright notice is on the page. Same is true for legal documents, end-user license agreements, rental agreements, etc. And if links are changeable, is text subject to change as well? Might Google correct our spelling? Or might they correct our thinking? Where is the line?

Straight from user-requested automatic links to George Orwell’s 1984.

I’ve participated in this sort of insidious conspiracy myself. I have an Extension to Firefox that inserts a graphic next to any link that is a PDF, MP3 or a number of other such links that piss me off when I click on them without being warned that my browser is going to try to load some huge-assed file.

I thought I was enhancing my experience and tailoring the web to work the way I’d prefer. Instead, I was walking down the slippery slope of Big Brother control of the web. If that plug-in can insert a graphic after a PDF, for example, what’s to stop it from taking every instance of “Winer” in a web page and substituting “Weenie”?

Hmmm… I wonder if Winer ever received permission beforehand to do SalonHerringWiredFool.Com? And I bet all of those organizations are happy he let the domain expire so it could become a porn site. Maybe Google should alter Dave’s thinking!

Search Engines: Garbage In, Garbage Out

I am an unabashed Google cheerleader. As far as I’m concerned, Google is one of the crowning achievements of human civilization — if you know what you’re doing, almost any question can be answered by Google. Of course, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then using Google is no better than taking lessons from that urban legend spam about how some terminally ill kid wants to set the record for most greeting cards.

A lot of people have taken to bitching about Google, but most of the complaints I see are from people who simply haven’t taken the time to figure out how to use the search engine, or (more frequently) make rookie mistakes that would hurt them regardless of what search engine or offline system they were using for research.

Take Scott Middleton — please. Middleton is offered up by the Register’s resident anti-Google nutjob, Andrew Orlowski, as a prime example of just how unreliable Google and other search engines are. But Middleton’s problem is actually his own ignorance about what he is searching for.

Middleton wanted to see what sort of information about World War II he could track down, so he typed in “Guadal Canal” in Google and, not surprisingly, received very poor search results in return. Middleton concludes that it is shameful that there should be such poor search results for such a key World War II battle.

Except, there was no battle of “Guadal Canal.” There was, however, a battle of “Guadalcanal.” If you search Google on the correct name of the battle, you will find very helpful links in the first 10 results, including a chronology of the battle, complete with maps and other information.

Is it Google’s fault that Middleton thinks that Guadal Canal is some sort of canal system, instead of knowing that Guadalcanal is the name of small island in the Pacific?

No, but even so, Google tries to compensate for its users’ ignorance. If you search on “Guadal Canal,” Google helpfully asks “Did you mean Guadalcanal?” So even if, like Middleton, you don’t know the first thing about World War II battles, Google will step in and try to set you straight.

At some point you have to ask the user to resort to some sort of common sense or basic attention to detail. If people like Middleton want information about Sony, but search on Sanyo, there’s not much that even the best system can do to help.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Source:

Our kids deserve better than a Google™ future. Andrew Orlowski, The Register, September 20, 2004.

Same Old Dave on Google

If Dave Winer didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. Dave’s company, Userland, makes products so good at doing search that Winer uses Google for searching his own blog. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop Winer from not only criticizing Google for failing to implement non-trivial features, but goes on to suggest that Google is intentionally trying to destroy blogs (emphasis added),

It’s very true that Google has failed to keep up with the “search engine optimization” tricks that cause links to porn sites to show up on our Referers pages and blog post comments. As we’ve said here several times, and thought many more, Google is the place where this practice should be stopped. It’s because of Google that our sites are littered with links to these offensive sites that have nothing to do with ours. If they’re smart enough to come up with tricks like Google News and Local Google, why can’t their search engine recognize comment and referer spam and not use it in determining page rank? Of course they can. Why don’t they? I’d love to hear an explanation. Better yet, I’d love to see them fix it. It’s a bug in Google’s software.

Maybe secretly Google really doesn’t like blogs. Maybe it’s not so secret. They still haven’t deigned to support the standard format for syndication, as every other tech company and major publisher has. Why Google has a stake in breaking the standard is another puzzle. How does this relate to Don’t Be Evil. We’ve asked this question a few times, only to be met with the usual Google stone wall.

When Google News first came out, Dave derided it as defective. Now it’s so good, its evidence that Google really doesn’t want to stop search engine optimization tactics.

I could go on about how Google usually get slammed by people, including Winer, when it tweaks its algorithms to try to deal with those trying to game the system, but the site of Dave complaining about a vendor being slow to fix a bug is simply too much to get past.