I've noticed a new thing on Google search results lately, called "Results for Similar Searches". If it doesn't think my search query has a lot of results, it comes up with other similar combinations of keywords that would get more results, and puts them on the bottom half of the first results page.
The problem is, this feature has never once been helpful to me. For example, I was searching for an individual. I won't use the real name here, but my search was analogous to jon smythe toronto. So Google, under "Results for Similar Searches", kept giving me results for things that were analogous to john smith toronto or john toronto or even john smith. Which is not what I needed. I spelled the individual's name correctly. I put "Toronto" to limit results. I chose my search terms quite deliberately. Cluttering up my first page of results with similar terms that produce unrelated results just pisses me off.
As another example, in an attempt to clarify Reddit's April Fool's joke, I googled reddit what do all the hats mean. The "Results for Similar Searches" contained what do all caps mean and what does many hats mean (the latter in the context of wearing several hats in one's job, i.e. fulfilling many roles.) Neither of these were remotely relevant. I was looking for a chart that would give me a meaning of each of the little hat flare icons that you could put on people's Reddit usernames. But even if you didn't know what I was looking for, it should be clear that the presence of the word "reddit" in my search was important. Even if I had meant one of those two similar searches and had misspoken "caps" into "hats" or "many" into "all the", I wouldn't have typed "reddit" unless I meant it for a reason.
I've complained in the past about how Google's attempts to "help" me interfere with my attempts to use it as a corpus for linguistic research, but this is worse because they're interfering with searches for actual information. Usually Google's predictions are helpful (I don't even worry about typoes when I'm searching, and I actually use their autocorrect system when I'm doing medical translations and can't read handwritten medication names - I just type what I think I'm reading, and Google tells me what I really need), but this one is useless and disruptive, taking up valuable space on my first page of results that could otherwise go to actual results of my actual search.
I hope Google will eliminate this alleged feature, or at least fix its predictions so they're as useful as its usual autocorrect.
2 comments:
Back in the 90's, before the Internet entirely lost its innocence, my favorite search engine was Alta Vista, at least until their parent company DEC got compaqued and overnight Alta Vista went from being the best search engine to the worst. The beauty of Alta Vista was its simplicity. There's some subset of the web that's been indexed, and there's some subset of that collection of pages that satisfies the criteria of the search, and the search engine dumps it on you. It's called database integrity. Outputs are a function of inputs. My attitude toward this was that if the results I got were not "relevant" it meant that I had not chosen my search terms intelligently. Too many or too few results; ditto. Oh do I ever miss that. It's my job to figure out the search engine, not vice versa.
Lately I've been using duckduckgo.com. While they probably fall well short of anything I would call database integrity, their promise of "not bubbling" is the strongest claim anyone in the industry is making, and I appreciate it.
I do find Google's spelling corrections helpful, for the same reasons you do. But this latest suggestion function is ridiculous. As you say, it is never useful and makes the search results more annoying to read. #GoogleFail
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